Alexandroffsky and The Crimea photograph album

Alexandroffsky was the residence built in 1853 by Thomas DeKay Winans (1820-1878) on West Baltimore Street at Freemont Avenue in Baltimore City, razed in 1928. The Crimea was Winans' country house, overlooking Franklintown Road from Leakin Park. Built shortly before the Civil War, Crimea and surrounding property became city owned park land in the 1940s.

Thomas Winans, the eldest son of Ross Winans, was born in Sussex County, New Jersey and came to Baltimore in circa 1830 where his father was a machinist/engineer developing equipment for the Baltimore and Railroad. Thomas Winanas also trained as a machinist and soon went to work in the railroad industry, as did his brother William. Sent to Russia by their father in 1843 to work for the Nicolai Railroad, Thomas and William soon gained a contract to complete the railroad from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, in partnership with Joseph Harrison, and engineer from Philadelphia. Working in Russia off and on into the 1860s, the Winans brothers and their colleagues made sizeable fortunes from this work. Back in Baltimore, Thomas Winans pursued varied interests, especially mechanical inventions like the Cigar Boat and operated a soup house across the street from Alexandroffsky, which fed as many as 4,000 people daily in the early 1860s.

In 1847, Winanas married Celeste Revillon, a Russian woman of French and Italian descent, and they had four children. Winans was related by marriage to the family of artist James McNeill Whistler.