Built in 1911 by the Emerson Drug Company, the Bromo Seltzer Tower was originally capped with a fifty-one foot rotating model of the signature blue glass bottles of Bromo Seltzer (this was removed in '36 for structural concerns). In 1969, the building was donated to the City of Baltimore, and was used to house various City offices until 2006, when the Tower was purchased by Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower LLC, a cooperative between philanthropists Eddie & Sylvia Brown and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, and extensively renovated to create thirty distinctive working studio spaces for artists.

It is similar, though not identical to The Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Boston's Pine St. Inn tower that were modeled after the Torre del Mangia in Siena