The Baldwin School — Frank Furness's Last Hotel

The striking building at the heart of the Baldwin School campus on Montgomery Avenue in Bryn Mawr has a story that few who pass it know. It was never built to be a school at all. In eighteen ninety, the Pennsylvania Railroad commissioned the celebrated Philadelphia architect Frank Furness to design a resort hotel, the Bryn Mawr Hotel, meant to attract wealthy Philadelphians to the Main Line.

Furness created an elaborate French Chateau composition, and it still stands today. A resort it remained until eighteen ninety-six, when the Baldwin School, a preparatory school for girls founded in eighteen eighty-eight, leased the building. By nineteen twenty-two, Baldwin had purchased it outright.

The school has occupied the building ever since, adapting Furness's grand public rooms into classrooms and gathering spaces. An earlier Bryn Mawr Hotel had occupied this same site for the Pennsylvania Railroad around eighteen seventy-one. Furness's replacement outlasted the railroad's resort ambitions by more than a century, now sheltering generations of students in a building their architect intended for summer guests.