"Over the years, it has figured prominently in Baltimore's social, political and economic life, especially as it was located in a predominately tiny exclusive residential neighborhood, north of most of the other downtown hotels which were then clustered.In 1912, former President of Princeton University and now Governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, once a graduate student at the newly established The Johns Hopkins University (1876) in the 1880s, living at nearby Druid Hill Avenue, stayed at the Belvedere Hotel while attending the 1912 Democratic National Convention, sited in Baltimore at the old Fifth Regiment Armory on North Howard Street nearby.