Roland Park, the neighborhood you have entered, is what many urban historians consider the first planned residential suburb in the United States, a development that set the template for American suburban living a full century ahead of the postwar exodus to the suburbs. Roland Park was developed beginning in 1891 by the Roland Park Company, a British investment consortium that hired the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. — son of the designer of Central Park — to plan a residential community on the wooded hillsides north of Baltimore. The Olmsted plan established the principles that would define American suburbia: curving streets that followed the natural terrain rather than a grid, deep setbacks from the street, deed restrictions requiring single-family homes of minimum value, extensive tree preservation, and a commercial district at the transit line stops.
The Olmsted vision created neighborhoods of extraordinary beauty — the mature tree canopy, the varied architecture of bungalows and Colonial Revivals and Tudor cottages set back on deep lots, and the quiet residential streets still look much as they did in 1910. Roland Park also established another precedent that would define American suburbia for generations: the deed restrictions prohibited the sale of property to African Americans and Jews. These racial and religious covenants were common in planned suburbs across America until the Supreme Court ruled them unenforceable in 1948.
The beauty of Roland Park and the injustice built into its founding are inseparable; to understand American suburbia is to understand both.