Roland Park, Baltimore

Roland Park Historic District
House along Goodwood Gardens
Location: Baltimore, Maryland
Architect: Olmsted,Frederick Law, Et al.
Architectural style: Late Victorian, Late 19th And 20th Century Revivals
Governing body: Local
NRHP Reference#: 74002213[1]
Added to NRHP: December 23, 1974

Roland Park is the first planned "suburban" community in North America, located in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It was developed between 1890 and 1920 as an upper-class streetcar suburb. The early phases of the neighborhood were designed by Edward Bouton and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

Roland Park Elementary/Middle School, a K-8 school [2], earned the Blue Ribbon for Academic Excellence from the state department of education. The neighborhood is home to several excellent private schools: Friends School of Baltimore, Gilman School, Roland Park Country School, the Bryn Mawr School, Cathedral School, and Boys' Latin School of Maryland.

St. Mary's Seminary and University is located in Roland Park. The Baltimore Light Rail's Cold Spring Lane station is within walking distance of much of the neighborhood, just across the Jones Falls Expressway to the west.

Roland Park Shopping Center

Roland Park Shopping Center is a single building strip of stores which opened in 1907 to serve the community, located at the corner of Upland Road and Roland Avenue. It has been credited by Guinness World Records as the world's first shopping center (though some editions of Guinness incorrectly date it to 1896). Since it had only six stores, despite it being an important milestone, larger shopping centers such as the Country Club Plaza (1923) in Kansas City, Missouri have received more attention as being "first," depending on what definition is used.[3][4][5] The strip of shops shown in the photograph is not the shopping center. The shopping center is half a mile south on Roland Avenue, and is a two-story building with office space above its stores.

References

  1. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2007-01-23. http://nrhp.focus.nps.gov/natreg/docs/All_Data.html. 
  2. ^ Roland Park Public School http://rolandparkpublic.org/?page_id=2
  3. ^ Rybczynski, Witold. City Life p.204 (Scribner 1996) (ISBN 978-0684825298)
  4. ^ Urban Land Institute, The community builders handbook p. 125 (1954)
  5. ^ Marx, Paul. Jim Rouse: capitalist/idealist, p.111 (2007) (ISBN 978-0761839446) ("...it has a small cluster of shops near its center. That group of shops is generally considered to be the very first shopping center in America.")

External links