I thought I knew vintage Jewish Baltimore pretty well. And being a geeky architecture buff since my teens, I was fairly confident that I’d seen just about every building, structure, edifice and shotgun shack in B-more that had some kind of tangential Jewish connection.

But when someone recently mentioned to me the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and efforts to preserve this incredible building in West Baltimore, I must admit I was clueless.

The 134-year-old building, which has been owned by Coppin State University since 2003, is located at 2700 Rayner Avenue in the Mosher-Greater Rosemont neighborhoods. It actually hasn’t been a Jewish institution since 1923, when the asylum merged with the Betsy Levy Home orphanage and moved to West Belvedere Avenue (at the current site of the Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital).

The structure – which has been vacant since ’89—became the West Baltimore General Hospital and later the Lutheran Hospital of Maryland (where two of my closest cousins were born in the early ‘70s, as I was informed recently by my mother).

The asylum is now the focus of a grassroots campaign for a national competition called the “This Place Matters Community Challenge.” The competition, sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will have people from across the nation voting online to support historic buildings that exist within their communities. The project receiving the most votes by this Wednesday, Sept. 15, will be awarded a $25,000 grant.

The Jewish Museum of Maryland, the Coppin Heights Community Development Corp., and the groups Preservation Maryland and Baltimore Heritage Inc. are working closely with the university on the grant project.

Baltimore Heritage is also spearheading a project with Coppin to have the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

After reading up on the asylum, I found myself last week driving down West Lafayette Street, past all of the boarded-up houses, bodegas, storefront churches and corner taverns, to check out the orphanage building.

It is an amazing facility – a red-brick Victorian Romanesque structure with battlements, turrets and intricate cornice resembling a fortress. With merely a sliver of imagination, you can see indigent youngsters in the late 19th and early 20th century running around the lawns and through the hallways, like a scene out of “Oliver!”

But I have to confess, I didn’t get out of my car to look around the building (which is quite dilapidated and for the most part boarded-up). Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like a wise idea to poke around too much in this neighborhood (and I was already getting some weird stares from a few guys on the street).

Of course, part of the reason why Baltimore Heritage and the other groups are working so hard to restore the asylum – besides to return the building to its former grandeur – is to help spark a socio-economic renaissance in that community. And that’s certainly a worthy endeavor.

It’s going to take more than $25,000 to restore this building; it’ll take millions. But it is a start, and West Baltimore could use a new beginning. Just take a drive down West Lafayette Street sometime and you’ll see what I mean.

For information about the preservation campaign or to vote for the asylum, visit mypreservationnation.org. The Facebook page for the campaign is facebook.com/baltimoreheritage.