Druid Hill Park, 745 acres that Baltimore acquired in 1860, spreads out from where you walk, one of the oldest and largest urban parks in the United States and the city's green lung for over 160 years. Druid Hill Park predates New York's Central Park completion and was the fourth large municipal park created in the United States. The city purchased the estate of Lloyd Nicholas Rogers for one million dollars — an enormous sum — and hired the landscape firm of Howard Daniels to transform the pastoral grounds into a public park designed in the English naturalistic tradition.
The rolling terrain, woodland paths, open meadows, and reservoirs that characterize the park today are largely the work of that original design, supplemented by decades of additions and improvements. The Maryland Zoo, established within the park in 1876, is one of the oldest zoos in the United States. The park's two reservoirs — Druid Hill Lake and Druid Reservoir — have historically supplied Baltimore's municipal water.
The park contains a significant collection of Victorian-era park structures: the Moorish Revival superintendent's lodge, the original bandstand, and the conservatory. Druid Hill Park was the site of one of Baltimore's most significant civil rights confrontations: tennis courts within the park were segregated until a 1948 protest by a group of Black tennis players who refused to leave the whites-only courts, an act of resistance that led to the desegregation of Baltimore's public parks years before federal civil rights legislation.