Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA in History
Department
History
First Advisor
Kristin M Szylvian
Second Advisor
Susan Schmidt Horning
Abstract
This study addresses the circumstances that led to and the long-term consequences of racially exclusive suburban developments in Baltimore City during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1891, British investors and urban planners joined together to build the Roland Park District, one of the nation’s first planned suburban neighborhoods to include a racially restrictive covenant. Ideally located on the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore developed a high-functioning port, which in turn supported westward expansion, progress, industrialization, and immigration. Located just north of Baltimore’s 1888 city limits, which would later expand to absorb Roland Park in 1918, Roland Park was built as an upper-class streetcar suburb. Inspired by the rise of the garden city movement and similar planned suburbs like Riverside, Illinois, the Roland Park Company intended their development to capture the desired ideals of nature, beauty, and luxury without sacrificing proximity to urban centers. Gaining an understanding of the rationale, profitability, and social circles of the Roland Park Company developers captures the motivation behind the long-lasting consequences of the development. This thesis aims to analyze the foundation laid and the precedent set by the Roland Park Company in Baltimore by investigating the historical beginnings of Baltimore, the Roland Park Company Records Collection, City of Baltimore infrastructure records, the works of urban planners including Ebenezer Howard, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Civil Rights Laws, and formalized housing policies. Furthermore, in a city with a large African-American population, the Black communities in Baltimore suffered from the institutionalization and spread of housing policies based on race and class that emerged following the garden suburb developments. While the Roland Park District only occupied a few square miles of Baltimore City, it dramatically deepened racial, class, and wealth divides in the city and across the nation due to its successful exclusionary practices.
Recommended Citation
O’Donnell, Madison Rose, "“1000 ACRES OF RESTRICTED LAND”: THE LARGER IMPLICATIONS OF ROLAND PARK ON BALTIMORE, FROM 1891 TO THE PRESENT" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 748.
https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations/748