This week’s featured Baltimore Building is the Roland Park Shopping Center. Read more about the history of the Roland Park neighborhood on the Roland Park website.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Around 1900 the curving streets and extensive landscaping of the “garden suburb” provided an attractive alternative to the stately rows and squares that had long housed Baltimore’s elites. Roland Park was by no means the first garden suburb, even in Baltimore (see Sudbrook Park), but it was the most fully realized, with its streetcar line, parkway entrance, country club, architectural (and racial) covenants, and innovative shopping center. Built in 1895, the half-timbered shopping center with its flamboyant Flemish gable, housed essential neighborhood shops below and doctors’ and dentists’ offices above. What was new is that all this was set back from the street – to give parking space for the automobiles that were soon to choke the old gridded city.

Under the leadership of Edward H. Bouton, the Roland Park Company not only built Guilford, Homeland, and Original Northwood for Baltimore’s upper middle class, but participated in plans for worker housing during the two world wars, planning more modest garden suburbs at Dundalk and Cherry Hill.

This edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan, highlights an architectural style as common for detached houses of Baltimore’s outer neighborhoods as the Italianate Rowhouse is to the neighborhoods close to downtown,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

The exposed timbers of the Stick Style, found on last week’s Mt. Washington Presbyterian Church, were one way that American builders broke free of the French and English Victorian deigns of the late 19th century. Another way, also based on the abundance of wood for building in North America, was the “Shingle Style.” The origin of the name is unmistakable – buildings (primarily houses) were covered in “cedar shake” shingle siding, allowed to weather naturally. In New England, this meant gray, in Baltimore’s climate dark brown. Other “natural” materials included slate roofs and fieldstone foundations and chimneys. Shingle designs also feature large geometrical masses, like big triangular gables and cylindrical turrets. The gambrel-roofed house depicted here stands in Roland Park, Baltimore’s first “garden suburb.” Developed in the 1890s it broke free of the grid pattern of streets in favor of leafy lanes that mirror the underlying natural topography.