Home, sweet... bank?
Old bank building in Uniontown restored as a single-family home now
for sale
The old rural community bank at 3424 Uniontown Road was built more than 110 years ago, and sat vacant for 30 years before former Sykesville Mayor Jonathan Herman purchased it from Historic Uniontown Inc. in 2015 — when it was at risk for collapse if expensive repairs weren’t made.
“It’s in a historic district. I had to come up with a historically compatible design, and Steve [Ziger, the architect], did a great job,” said Herman, who is also the founder and president of Herman Construction Inc.
“I was kind of enamored by the old structure,” he said. “So the front room, whoever buys this house, is going to have a perfectly preserved front room and perfectly modern three-story addition behind it.”
By the time Herman bought the building in 2015, Historic Uniontown had replaced the roof, repaired iron bars on the windows, replaced a boiler and made other repairs over the years with grant money the organization received — but some repairs could not be completed due to lack of funding.
When Morabito Consultants evaluated the building that year, the structural engineering firm confirmed it had deteriorated so much the bank’s rear wall was structurally unsafe and needed to be replaced. That was money Historic Uniontown didn’t have.
The Carroll County Savings Bank originally constructed the building in 1907 before it was purchased by the Taneytown Bank in 1951. Historic Uniontown owned the bank from 1979 — when Taneytown Bank operations were moved to another Uniontown location — until Herman purchased it.
Herman, who has been in the restoration business for 45 years, said he always loved the bank and knew he needed to do something when Historic Uniontown reached out to him with dire news: The back wall had just collapsed and they were going to demolish the building in two weeks unless they could find someone to stabilize it.
“They put a fence around the entire building because they thought it was going to explode or something,” Herman said. “But it’s like a time capsule, just beautiful.”
Ziger, the project architect from Ziger|Snead Architects, said it was Herman’s vision that inspired the design, and they wanted it to be “simple and elegant.”
“At Ziger-Snead we do a lot of historic renovation projects,” he said, “but also a number of projects around the region that involve modern additions in historic contexts.”
One example of a recent Ziger|Snead project is the Parkway Theatre — a 1915 movie theater on North Avenue in Baltimore, he said. The firm designed a modern building with a new lounge and two other theaters right next to the old Parkway building.
“So we love the idea. We love communicating through design that history is living: that there’s this incredible, beautiful bank building that was once a real anchor in its community; that by creating an addition that turns it into a new use, it also communicates the new life or new moment for the future — so that it’s both rooted in the past and looking to the future,” Ziger said. “Those types of projects really get our creative juices flowing, because of that narrative of kind of connecting past to present.”
Ziger designed a three-story modern addition erected off the back of the old bank building with two bedrooms, a modern kitchen in an open living area, rooftop deck and a wall of windows looking out over the backyard.
The building was completed recenntly and
“I think it would be great for a live-work kind of thing. If you were an accountant and had clients meet there — I think it would be good for somebody who had a home business, or someone who likes antiques. It’s such a unique space,” Herman said.
“It was tough [deciding what to do]. What could you do with a bank? You can’t make it a bank anymore, but a single-family home? Everybody needs a place to live.”
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