RPEMS Lecture

When my old friend, Tom Gamper asked me to present a lecture on Roland Park School, he was asking me in the context of my work with the Dead Architects Society and the architects, Palmer & Lamdin, who designed the school.

Today, I will be talking about the history of the school and how it came to be, but I will be mostly talking about the school’s unique architecture.

By the 1920's, the oldest parts of Roland Park were more than 30 years old, and it was beginning to become a settled neighborhood, not just a summer enclave. So, it needed a school which all the local children could attend. 

There was a small school, known as Todd’s Academy, with an enrollment of 112 children, on the corner of Roland Avenue and St. John’s Road. But there was not enough room to expand to accommodate the children who now were living in the area.

At this time, Baltimore was embarking on an ambitious plan, building schools in many of Baltimore's neighborhoods using the services of some of the city's best architects. And certainly, schools of that era reflect the classical architecture which was the watchword. 

Oldies like me still refer to the school as Roland Park Public School to delineate it from Roland Park Country Day School, located directly across the street since the late 1970s.

The plan was to build a new school with 16 classrooms, and the enrollment was projected to be about 700 students, which equaled more than 40 children per classroom. The land for the school had been acquired by the City through eminent domain from property owned by the Gilman School. 

The City’s allocation for the project was $430,000, which is about $48.6 million today. This included the design/build for the building and playgrounds, paving and plantings.

It originally did not include an auditorium/gymnasium because funds had not yet been allocated,but an auditorium does appear on the architects’ 1925 plans.

As mentioned, Baltimore City tapped the architects Palmer & Lamdin to design the school. Edward Palmer had been the “house architect” for the Roland Park Company and later designed many of the most interesting houses in Homeland and Guilford. Additionally, Palmer & Lamdin worked on sections of Bryn Mawr and Friends Schools.

Many of Palmer & Lamdin’s influences were inspired by their European travels. English, and specifically Cotswolds-style architecture was a particular favorite, followed by the chalets of Switzerland, and architecture from the Normandy region of France. They did design an Italian monastery in Howard County in 1926, therefore, an Italian-style school building was not much of a stretch.

The school is modeled on a classic Italianate design, unlike anything else in Roland Park.

To emphasize its importance, the school was built on a small rise on the main street through Roland Park.

Key visual components of the Italianate style include:

1. Low-pitched or flat roofs, barely discernable from the ground.
2. Arched windows
3. Tall first floor windows
4. Campanile or bell towers
5. Small “Juliette-style” balconies
6. Terracotta “Barrel-style” tiled roofs
7. Loggias

About 15% of Italianate buildings in the United States include a tower, which, at Roland Park, was an early ventilation system.

In the original blueprints, which I was able to photograph at the University of Baltimore’s architectural archives, you can see that the building’s design didn’t vary too much from the architects’ plans and elevations.

The windows still retain their iron-work grids, and the brick columns between the windows have been rendered in a demi-hexagonal shape,

a detail which would go un-noticed unless you were really looking, but which adds to the grace of the building.

The brickwork at the top of the campanile is very unusual with two courses of bricks above the loggia. The inner course is a regular rounded keystone arch, while the outer one looks more gothic in style.

The decorative stone on the sides of some of the windows still remain. As does the design for the small balcony above the front door.

This 1962 photograph of a class at the Junior High School still shows some of the original details, including a “casualty clearing station” sign for civil defense. This was at the height of the Cold War and the school would have been used as a nuclear fallout shelter which would have been in the basement of the building.

Additionally, you can just see the bottoms of two lights on either side of the front door.

They’ve long been removed, but the design for the two light fixtures was discovered on the original blueprints and the lamp was the only detail rendered in color on dozens of pages. They are a fairly common style of lamp in the 1920’s.

The initial specifications for the building were to have had imitation stone trim, but there was a great deal of push-back for this, as it didn’t have the look or long wear of natural stone.

Letters to the editor of the Sun went back and forth, pro and con, and eventually the faux-stone people won the battle.

Under threat of arrest, the City’s building inspector had refused to issue a permit for the foundation and groundwork of the new school. The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 was still fresh in people’s minds, and the codes called for fire-safe cinderblock in the foundation. After several months, the issue was resolved, no one was arrested, and the construction could finally begin.

By December of 1926, newspaper stories were reporting that the new Roland Park School was already crowded. By 1928, a proposal for an addition was put out for bid and once again, Palmer & Lamdin won the job.

The addition would be added onto the north side of the building, backing up to the property owned by Gilman School. The capacity went from 850 to nearly 1,400 students. 

But nothing’s ever easy. In the spring of 1929, serious cracks were discovered in the wall of the gymnasium, then only three years old. It was closed to students immediately. The vertical cracks went along the structural piers which helped support the upper floor. It was said that the cracks had been visible for about three years, but that they hadn’t worried anyone, and they had just been plastered over!

The inspectors had opened the wall, but when the city’s crew came to take documentary photographs, the wall had been plastered and painted over to disguise where the cracks were. The wall was finally torn out so that steel girders could be installed, and it was found that there was no mortar between the bricks!!!

Additionally, surprise! there were issues with the cast stone that had been used, chunks of it were dropping off, and they crumbled at a touch.

In the early 1980s, rumblings began with a rumor that the Roland Park Public School would be torn down, and an entirely new building would be constructed. A distant second-place option was to renovate the school and install all new utilities.

Of course, a mighty uproar ensued, but the school was enlarged and renovated as we see it today.

Here are some interesting facts I discovered when I was researching this lecture:

• Between 1929 and 1931, the name of the street just to the south of the school was changed from Linden Avenue to Deepdene Road.
• Roland Park School was once home to one of public baths scattered around the city and funded by William Walters of Walters Art Museum fame. I found a small clip in a 1931 article in the Baltimore Sun which mentioned that the public baths located at Roland Park School had the fewest users of any other public bath in the city. Towels and soap were available for five cents per person.

It is down to the skill of the architects, Palmer & Lamdin, and the wisdom of those who followed, that the building that is Roland Park School is still intact, and retains most of its original classic Italianate design on its one-hundredth anniversary.

My sources for this lecture were:

• Maryland Historic Trust’s document: Baltimore City Schools Architecture, 1889 to 1941
• Newspapers.com
• Palmer & Lamdin.com
• Palmer & Lamdin and the Successor Firms’ Catalogue Raisonné
• Medusa: Maryland’s Cultural Resource Information System
• The University of Baltimore’s Architectural Archives.

A special thanks goes to RPEMS alumni, Anson Stine, who helped with the drone footage.

Thank you for including me in this special event.