Clifton Park is Baltimore’s fourth oldest country landscape park after Druid Hill, Patterson, and Carroll Parks. Around 1800, Baltimore merchant Henry Thompson purchased the rural property and began transforming the farmhouse into a federal style mansion called Clifton. In 1841, Johns Hopkins purchased the estate and hired William Saunders, a Scottish immigrant and professional horticulturist, to improve the grounds. Hoping his eponymous university would one day relocate to Clifton, Hopkins left it to the school.
During the Hopkins trustees’ tenure at Clifton, the landscape gardens were not well-maintained. Baltimore City condemned part of the estate to build a reservoir (now the site of a high school) and the impressive American gothic style valve house. In 1894 when the value of stock in the B&O Railroad plummeted, the trustees sold Clifton to Baltimore City for $1 million to raise operating expenses for the university.
In 1895, the Baltimore Park Commission began making improvements for a public park and invested in the rehabilitation of various gardens and roadways. The Olmsted Brothers 1904 report recognized Clifton as one of the city’s major parks that would anchor the system. The firm recommended that a comprehensive plan be prepared for Clifton, but instead, the Park Commission retained them to design a series of projects over the course of nine years.
The first project was an athletic ground in the southern part below the railroad, where an Olmsted era stone wall still remains. The Olmsted Brothers also designed a swimming pool, which at the time was the largest concrete swimming pool in the country. In addition, they planned a band shell, which was damaged by fire significantly in 1947. A renovated and stripped band shell stands in its place today. Later additions to the park that are also historically significant include Baltimore’s first public golf course (1916) and Mothers’ Garden (1928), originally dedicated to “The Mothers of Baltimore.”
Following decades of abuse, Clifton’s Italianate villa is stabilized and the current tenant, Civic Works, is restoring the interior.
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Today, Wyman Park is a complex of highly-contrasting park spaces, half-hearted links, and a variety of associated urban edges. The 1904 Olmsted Brothers report singled out the Wyman Park section with its “old beech trees and bold topography” as “the finest single passage of scenery in the whole valley.”
By 1888, the Wyman Brothers had dedicated a part of their large estate to public uses. The center of the estate would become the new campus of Johns Hopkins University. The school’s trustees subsequently gave the remainder of the land to the City as a public park.
In the 1910s, each section of park received specialized attention from the Olmsted Brothers firm. Although the larger stream valley section was interrupted by railroad tracks and sewer lines, the Olmsted designs treated it as a natural reservation with pedestrian paths and a meandering parkway.
In contrast, the plan manipulated Wyman Park Dell into a miniature version of a signature Olmsted pastoral park. Over the years, indifferent landscaping, lack of additional parkway treatments and large parking lots contributed to the erosion of any sense of connectedness between the two main park spaces.
Some of the Wyman land was sold back to Hopkins in the 1960s. Buildings began to fill in smaller green spaces in the area. Both main sections of Wyman Park remain valuable natural preserves for their surrounding neighborhoods and the city as a whole.
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In south Baltimore, Latrobe Park still has traces of Olmsted design elements. Originally only 6 acres in size, this park was created to serve the working class neighborhoods on the Locust Point peninsula. Unlike much larger plans for Patterson and Clifton Parks also begun in 1904, what distinguishes Latrobe Park was the amount of active recreation that had to fit in a tight space.
In 1904, the Board of Park Commissioners retained the Olmsted Brothers firm to provide a plan that would accommodate a children’s play area, a men’s running track, and a small women’s fitness section. A broad promenade would overlook the park with trees and plantings while a grand stair with a fountain at its base would be the central entrance. In the middle of a wide lawn a grove of trees would provide a shaded haven for the public to sit and relax, or listen to band concerts. This design combined old sensibilities of parks as natural retreats with new ideas that parks could promote recreation.
Construction began in 1905 and much of the Olmsted design materialized. Over the years, the park has grown and added tennis courts and a baseball field. Today, a berm constructed for the I-395 Fort McHenry Tunnel obscures the view of the water, but the shipping cranes of the marine terminal are visible. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Latrobe Park. Through great community effort, neighbors upgraded the playground and planted trees.