A walk in the park

Rains held off during today’s historic walking tour of Clifton Park. The space, however, was just too vast to cover in a couple hours by foot. Someone suggested we might have appropriated the motorized golf carts to zip through the entire former Henry Thompson and Johns Hopkins estate and farm in Northeast Baltimore. 

The park includes Clifton Mansion, the city's first municipal golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool, City Farms, Mothers’ Garden, the old Valve House and rebuilt band shell, the going to seed gardener’s cottage as well as acres and acres of open green space, paths, roads, very old and young trees. 

The entire park has been owned by the city since its purchase from Hopkins trustees in the 1890s and as of 2007 has been on the National Register of Historic Places. A summary description of that nomination can be found at http://mht.maryland.gov/nr 

The Olmsted Bros. were brought in by the city to consult on some of the park's design elements including integrating active recreational space with more passive pastoral uses. Friends of Maryland’s Olmsted Parks & Landscapes partnered with Civic Works to organize this tour that sold out very quickly. 

Civic Works, tenant of Clifton Mansion, is an urban pioneer organization moving and greatly expanding Johns Hopkins legacy of community service into this century. Civic Works is spearheading extensive renovation of the estate house and hosts art, culture and historic exhibits, and provides many young people with good green jobs and skills while partnering throughout the city in creating community lots.

A highlight of the today’s tour was “On the Trail” sculpture presented to the park by Peabody Institute in 1916 which stands in stoic silence less than a hundred paces from the stark cement block serving as concession stand and relief station for golfers, which was NOT designed by the artist Edward Berge. Can MICA get a "hole in one" grant to do a total makeover of that block?

The survival of Clifton Park is a reminder of how valuable and precious open green space is to a city so crowded and full of asphalt that it is difficult to tell where once there was country and streams.