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Maryland—Baltimore—Roland Park

Roland Park: How It Got This Way by John Dorsey
Roland Park News Summer 2008 Volume Thirty

“In 1891 George Kessler of Kansas City became Roland Park’s first landscape architect and laid out Plat One, east of Roland Avenue and north of Cold Spring Lane. In 1898 and after the Olmsted brothers, son and stepson of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., designed the area west of Roland Avenue and north of Cold Spring Lane—now Plats Two, Three and Six. (Subsequently, they were also responsible for Plats Four and Five, from Spring Lane south to Wyman Park and from University Parkway east to Stony Run.)

&ldlquo;The Olmsteds developed more imaginative designs than Kessler’s, but Kessler’s and the Olmsteds’ designs had much in common. They laid out the streets and the lots according to the topography rather than in a grid plan, and created lots of various shapes and sizes, and plantings that emphasized naturalism and variety of surrounding views and larger vistas. As a result, the Roland Park Company could offer for sale an example of felicitous balance: a great variety of individual properties within overall design unity.”

The theme of this article and virtually all of the information in it, quoted and otherwise, comes from the masters thesis by Robert M. Moudry called “Gardens, Houses and People: The Planning of Roland Park, Baltimore”, which she generously made available to the writer.

Read more about Roland Park, Maryland at Roland Park News