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The Hackerman House is a historic building located in Baltimore, Maryland. It was built around 1848 for Dr. John Hanson Thomas, the great-grandson of John Hanson, President of the Continental Congress. The house is now part of the Walters Art Museum and is open to the public as a gallery for its growing and important collection of Asian Art.
The Hackerman House represented the height of elegance in the mid-nineteenth century. The house was remodeled extensively under the direction of Charles A. Platt in 1892, and the entire house was decorated in the Italian Renaissance style. The graceful circular staircase was widened and the oval Tiffany skylight installed in the coffered dome.
The house was purchased by Willard Hackerman in the late 1980s from the estate of its last owner, Harry Gladding. Mr. Hackerman was concerned about the possibility that the architectural anchor of Mount Vernon Place might be converted to commercial use so he took the keys and placed them on the desk of then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer who held a contest to determine the best use of the historic structure. The Walters won the competition with a proposal to convert the house into galleries for its growing and important collection of Asian Art and the beautiful Hackerman House opened to the public in the spring of 1991.
