Robinson Agresott Has Spent Nearly 50 Years Reversing Baltimore’s Formstone Fad

Albert Knight, who patented Formstone and resurfaced the face of Baltimore with the faux stone façade in the 1940s and 1950, had shuttered his company years before Robinson Agresott arrived in Charm City. The Formstone fad—John Waters’ “polyester of brick”—began to fade along with Knight’s patent rights by the late ’50s and he had turned his concrete inclinations to building bomb shelters.

In his stead, smaller companies, knock-off brands with names like Permastone, Romanstone, and Modern Stone, continued the rowhouse makeovers, but by the time Agresott immigrated from Colombia in the mid-1970s, tastes had done a 180.

“People had started coming to this vision, that these rowhomes in Federal Hill and Fells Point, many built in the late 1800s, should look historical, realistic,” says Agresott. “Authentic,” he adds with a smile, finding the right word in his second language as he climbs off some scaffolding.

On this late summer afternoon, the 76-year-old puts his crowbar down and takes a break from pulling the heavier-than-they-look slabs of concrete from a recently sold Upper Fells rowhouse.

“Removing the Formstone and repointing the brick, it was becoming a big business, and I got hooked in. That was 1977. I’ve been doing this ever since.” He even appeared, briefly, removing Formstone in the Baltimore documentary short Little Castles, directed by Skizz Cyzyk, in 1998 (at the 21:30 mark).

Agresott had previously spent three years in Baltimore as a petty officer on a Colombian Navy vessel docked here for an extended stay. He and shipmates played softball and soccer against local Coast Guard and company teams, and he got to meet one of his baseball idols, Brooks Robinson, who had played winter ball in Colombia.

He fell in love with the city, and a young woman. He’d hoped to return to both after his discharge, only to learn once he’d made his way back to Baltimore that his girlfriend had a new boyfriend. (Her mother, who felt bad, briefly put him up.) Shortly after, he stumbled into his life’s work and, of course, met another young woman, to whom he’s still happily married and raised four children with in their Federal Hill rowhouse.

At the moment, neither Agresott nor his wife, who works at Boog’s BBQ at Camden Yards, have plans to retire. “Why? To sit at home?”

In the Navy, he had worked in the electrical department, “but because of the language barrier, I couldn’t do that in Baltimore,” says the lean Agresott, who moves like he could still play shortstop, shrugging in an Orioles T-shirt. “I took to this. I enjoy making the homes look beautiful. People say, ‘You’re not a bricklayer, you’re an artist,’ which makes me feel good. Come back when I’m done. You’ll see.”