After years of planning and fundraising, Hillside Park is almost a reality.
Leaders of the Roland Park Community Foundation told area residents this week that the organization is about a month away from taking ownership of a 20-acre parcel that will become a public green space called Hillside Park.
During a meeting of the Roland Park Civic League on Wednesday, community foundation chair Mary Page Michel and other board members said the organization has raised all of the funds needed to purchase the sloping property from the Baltimore Country Club (BCC) and outlined the next steps for turning the land into a park.
“We are on the cusp of owning the park!” Michel told about 40 people who attended the meeting.
The future park site runs along Falls Road across from the athletic fields of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and Western High School. It’s the majority of a 32-acre parcel owned by the country club, which is retaining the rest, including its club house at 4712 Club Road.
The community foundation signed a contract on Dec. 21, 2021 to purchase the 20-acre parcel from the country club for $9 million and has been working since then to raise funds and complete the sale.
Michel said one of the last steps required before the property could change hands was to make sure the soil isn’t contaminated with hazardous chemicals, and environmental remediation work has been carried out over the last six months.
“The country club is an old golf course, the portion that we’re buying, and it had environmental issues on the property,” she explained.
One issue was the presence of arsenic, which was used to treat golf courses in the late 1800s and had to be cleaned up. “That has been done…and we had to file [proof of the remediation] with the state so that we wouldn’t be legally responsible,” she said.
Michel said the buyers need Maryland’s Department of the Environment to sign off on the remediation work that was completed, and she expects that to happen within days. Once the state signs off on the remediation work, Michel said, settlement will take place within 30 days.
Retaining 12 acres
The country club owns land in Baltimore County and is retaining its Roland Park club house and surrounding area for events in the city.
The community foundation’s goal is to create a free park that is accessible from dawn to dusk like a city-owned park but owned and managed by a private non-profit organization. It will be one of the largest new parks to be created in Baltimore in the past century.
Michel said the foundation was prepared to take out a loan to help pay for the property but that won’t be necessary because of the successful fundraising effort. She said contributions have been made by 967 donors, who come from 42 Baltimore City neighborhoods, 30 Maryland communities and 20 states. The remediation work was paid for by the sellers.
The next steps will be to hire a landscape architect and hold planning sessions called charrettes to determine what the park will feature. Past suggestions have included tennis, basketball and pickleball courts; a children’s playground; a ball field; a community garden; nature paths and areas for quiet contemplation.
‘Big charrettes’
Michel said preliminary plans by Stone Hill Design give an idea what the park might contain and now the selected landscape architect will work with community members to come up with a final plan.
She said charrettes for a project such as this work best when they are held on site, but no one from the community has been able to meet on the property because it’s still owned by the country club and technically off limits to the public. In addition, people weren’t allowed on the land while the environmental remediation work was underway.
“I had hoped that we could do that before we purchased the property but the property is owned by the Baltimore Country Club and there are going to have to be some really big charrettes with the neighborhoods,” she said.
“In order to have people say what they want to see in the park, you have to be in the park…Every time I go on the property I have to get permission. So to get permission for 150 people or 300 people or however many people would come to this…we have to wait until we buy it and then we’ll have this process. That will be the next really exciting thing we’ll be working on.”
Gaining access to the land will also help the foundation document what’s there now so members have an accurate starting point to work from as they develop final plans, said foundation treasurer John Kevin.
The site plan used to raise funds is “an artist’s rendition of what’s there” but isn’t sufficiently detailed for planning purposes, Kevin said. One benefit of the remediation work, he said, is that the foundation now has additional information about the land that was generously given by the architect who worked on that process, such as the elevations of certain areas and the location of sewer lines.
That “gives us a nice starting plan,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d have to pay somebody to create that, and that’s not cheap. The fact that they handed it to us with no problem at all is really helpful.”
Among other things, he said, the foundation will be able to take the information it now has about the land to figure out the dimensions of grassy areas that need to be mowed, and use that to seek bids from landscaping companies.
Following Olmsted principles
Once the landscape architect comes up with a final design, the foundation will be able to determine cost estimates for proposed improvements. The foundation has secured several grants to cover certain projects but more funds will be needed.
Michel said the foundation wants the park’s design to follow the principles of “the Olmsted firm,’ which designed many of Baltimore’s parks. “Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed all of the spaces around it, so we want it to look like it fits in,” she said.
She warned that the park likely won’t have a lot of programming in the beginning, because adding elements such as pickleball courts is expensive.
“We don’t have a lot of money, so for a long time it’s going to be passive recreational space,” she said.
To the extent the community wants the park to include certain features, she said, they’ll be added as money becomes available. She noted that during the fundraising process, some potential donors declined to give money to purchase the land but expressed interest in funding improvements once the sale goes through.
“Learning park’
One of the foundation’s goals for the property, said Michel and foundation secretary Chris McSherry, is to make it a “learning park” for students, whether they come from Johns Hopkins University, Poly and Western high schools, or other places.
There are many ways the park can be used as an extension of the classroom to teach students about biology, the environment, climate change and other subjects, McSherry said. In addition, the foundation plans to launch a website specifically related to Hillside Park, with the history of the property and a map and rules pertaining to the property, and to create educational signs to display throughout the area.
“We have always talked about…making it an educational place,” Michel said. The students at Poly-Western are “really, really smart kids…Any way that we can make this park a conduit for these kids to save the world, we can do that.”
Asked whether a certain amount of land has already been set aside for basketball courts or other specific uses, Michel said that’s not the case.
“We have not promised anything to anybody,” she said. “We have no commitments.” Decisions about land use will come out of the planning process that’s yet to take place, she said, urging audience members to “be a part of it.”
‘A park for Baltimore’
Michel said the foundation is creating a separate 501(c)(3) entity called Hillside Park Inc. to manage the park. She explained that creating a separate entity will protect the Roland Park Community Foundation’s funds in case anyone files a lawsuit related to the park. “God forbid, if anyone gets hurt and wants to sue, they’ll sue Hillside Park Inc., not Roland Park Community Foundation,” she said.
The board of directors overseeing Hillside Park will include people from all over the city, not just immediate neighbors, Michel said.
“This is going to be a park for Baltimore,” she said. Although the committee that will determine the board’s makeup hasn’t formally met yet, she said, “we have been gathering names of people and we have a lot of interest from all different neighborhoods. The selection committee for the landscape architect will also be people from schools, people from other neighborhoods, so we will be very intentional from the very first day about making sure that this is a park for Baltimore.”
Quitclaim deed
MacSherry, an attorney, said the foundation intends to convey a 1.2-acre strip along Falls Road to the city at settlement. She said the group discovered during its due diligence period that part of the land offered for sale by the country club is actually city property, according to a 1902 deed, and the foundation wants to make sure the city is identified in land records as the owner.
“All the city maps show that as city land,” she said. “We still want it to be the city’s land, because it is the city’s, and we want to set the record straight. So once we close with BCC, we will immediately do what’s called a quitclaim deed to the city, which basically says whatever claim we have [to the land], we release it, it’s yours. It goes back to being the city’s land.”
One benefit of making sure the city is clearly identified as the owner, McSherry said, is that the 1.2-acre strip has a number of trees that need to be removed, and the new owners would like the city to pay for that work so the foundation’s money can be used in other ways.
Impact on sledding
Before Wednesday’s meeting, a donor had expressed concerns that the country club was planting trees on land that it will retain, and the locations they chose will make it harder for sledders to use an area known as Suicide Hill because they won’t be able to get a running start the way they could in the past.
Michel said she’s aware of that concern but visitors will still be able to use another part of the park for sledding. She said the country club was required to plant trees to replace ones that were cut down and the foundation has no authority to dictate where the country club can plant trees on property it owns.
“When they did the remediation, they took out a number of large trees, and they were required by the Maryland Department of the Environment to replace those trees,” she said. “We have no right to tell them what to do and what not to do.”
The country club chose to plant the replacement trees across the hill, she said. “Eventually, it’s going to be a forest across there…Visually, it is a barrier. It’s going to be a beautiful barrier.”
As an alternative, “we will allow sledding on the meadowlands” portion of the property, she said. “It’s a great sledding hill. I went over there this winter to see if people were actually sledding on it. I took pictures and sent it to our team. There were like 40 kids sledding down there. I think there’s going to be a lot less broken legs on that one than the other one. Ultimately, we will have to take out insurance on it.”
McSherry said that, as a former defense lawyer for the Department of Natural Resources, “I was not that sad that sledding couldn’t happen on Suicide Hill anymore.”
‘A lot of responsibility’
Even before the purchase is complete, the foundation is working to raise funds for an endowment to help pay for the park’s maintenance.
“We’re not going to stop until we have an endowment,” Michel said. “Baltimore City has some of the best parks in the country, fantastic parks, [but] we don’t have the money to maintain them. That’s why we’re the first new park of its size in Baltimore City in 100 years, because they don’t have the maintenance funds. And we won’t make that mistake.”
Raising money for an endowment has been part of the plan from the beginning, Michel said.
“It’s a lot of responsibility” to maintain a park, she said. “I would love it if the city would come in and do the maintenance on it, but it’s not going to happen. They need the money for other parks. So we have to be careful stewards of this property…It’s absolutely something that we care about and we’re concerned about, and we’ve been thinking about it since day one.”
