Edmondson

Six neighborhoods along Edmondson to Hunting Ridge built up on the high ground beyond the Gwynns Falls between 1910 and 1930. They comprise Baltimore's most distant suburb of daylight row homes. Begun as residences for streetcar commuters --developers advertised them as a half hour from downtown Baltimore -- these neighborhoods were completed with houses built with garages. New residents traveled neighborhood thoroughfares into the city and County. Elevation, and natural and built boundaries, bequeathed an identity to the residential construction very similar to that of rowhouse architecture elsewhere. Cathedral Cemetery, which isolated the neighborhoods from Frederick Road industry and detached estates and country houses built in the county, and the Gywnns Falls, hemmed them in on the east and south.

Boundaries of Edmondson extend clockwise from the intersection of the Western Maryland Railway and Edmondson along Edmondson, Woodington, Rokeby Road to just east of Seminole, thence north-northwest west to Gwynns Falls, and along the Falls and Railroad. Entirely residential, it includes five large churches, two schools, and one playground; forty percent of the acreage is green space and wooded land within Gwynns Falls Park.

These blocks formed part of the late seventeenth century estates of "Morning's Choice" and "Parker's Place," the latter a 1695 grant to Robert Parker. "Bonnie Brae," property of Charles H. McBlair, spread over southern sections in the middle of the nineteenth century. Acreage north of Edmondson made up part of "Lyndhurst" and of "Gelston," the property of Hugh Gelston eventually called Gelston Heights and having access to Franklintown Road. Reverdy Johnson, lawyer, Attorney General of the United States during the presidency of Zachery Taylor, United States Senator, and ambassador to Great Britain, owned "Lyndhurst."

A scattering of craftsmen, farm laborers, and quarry workers made up a tiny settlement close to the Falls before development. The extension of a trolley line in 1899, opening of the new Gwynns Falls span, and extension of city water and sewage systems, prompted construction before and after World War I. Daylight row and duplex houses with porches lined Edmondson by 1914, streets one block north of Edmondson during the 1920s, and three blocks beyond Edmondson and on Lyndhurst during the 1930s. Many were put up by builder James Keelty. He acquired property along Edmondson by 1922, and the Gelston and Johnson property in 1926 and 1928.

Advertisements highlighted the green space features of Keelty built homes. Houses sat on a hilltop and overlooked the scenic Falls. A fifteen-foot green park strip distinguished Wildwood, where houses were built wider and deeper, twenty-two by thirty-seven feet. Half-attics there added extra room, and garages defined homes as modern. Fireplaces, tile porches, and exterior variety within rows distinguished the homes from typical Keelty-built rows.

Edmondson Avenue was widened to facilitate automobile traffic in the 1920s, sycamore trees were planted along many streets, and Lyndhurst Elementary School was opened in 1928. A neighborhood of young families was sometimes dubbed "Mortgage Hill." Northern sections of Edmondson were finished with plainer rows in the 1940s and 1950s after Keelty's death, by his sons. Edmondale Apartments, spreading over four and one-half blocks north and west from Stokes and Wildwood, and comprising 262 units of two bedrooms each, was built by 1950. African Americans moved to Edmondson in large numbers in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Mount Olivet Baptist Church, a congregation formed in 1922, occupies a facility that once housed the Edmondson Theatre; Mount Olive Holy Evangelical Apostolic, Lyndhurst and Edmondson, the sanctuary put up by All Saints Evangelical Lutheran. Keelty contributed the sanctuary of St. Bernadine, built in 1929. A shrine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, made of Carrera Italian marble and dedicated to the fallen and the survivors of the two World Wars, was put up in 1948. Edmondson Avenue Methodist is formed from two Methodist Protestant congregations, one at Edmondson and Grantley, and the other, Christ Methodist Protestant, originating on Baker near Fulton.