The design was never about children
School as we know it is a recent invention. Children learned outdoors alongside adults doing real work for nearly all of human history. Then the industrial era needed workers who could keep a schedule and repeat a task, and schooling was rebuilt to produce them. Bells, rows, everyone doing the same thing at once. The design answered a question about what scales, not a question about what children need.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, people in several countries started building alternatives. John Dewey opened a laboratory school in Chicago in 1896. Maria Montessori opened the Casa dei Bambini in a poor quarter of Rome in 1907. Rudolf Steiner opened the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart in 1919. Baltimore's entry came in 1912, between Montessori and Steiner, and it came out of a firing.
In 1911, Mayor James Preston fired James Van Sickle, the superintendent who had brought kindergartens, playgrounds, and manual training into Baltimore's public schools. Van Sickle had also been setting real standards for how teachers were hired and textbooks chosen, taking those decisions away from politicians who had been handing out school jobs to their friends. The firing cut short the most serious attempt Baltimore had made to run its public schools on the idea that the curriculum should follow the child.
A closed door, and the school behind it
Some of the parents counting on that vision could not simply leave for a private school. Baltimore's independent schools held quotas that sharply limited Jewish enrollment, and some refused Jewish children outright.
So they built their own. They raised the money in ten days, much of it through the Phoenix Club, which existed because Jewish Baltimoreans were barred from the city's other social clubs. A door closed on the fathers, and the room behind it funded the school for their children.
The Park School of Baltimore opened on September 30, 1912, in a townhouse on Auchentoroly Terrace across from Druid Hill Park, as the first non-sectarian independent school in the city. The park was its playground.
Non-sectarian meant every religion. It did not mean every child, and Park enrolled no Black students for forty-two years. That changed in June 1954, a month after Brown v. Board, which did not apply to private schools. Under pressure from Park's own students, the board voted to consider applications from any family. The founders built the school because a door had been closed to them. It took their grandchildren to open it to somebody else.
In 1959 Park moved to a hundred acres in Baltimore County. It now has woodlands, trails, a pond, a stream folded into the curriculum for more than fifty years, story walks, and a ropes course. Children use all of it every day as a matter of course.
The gateways, and what replaced them
Druid Hill Park was built to be walked into. Eighteen neighborhood access points ran along its southern and western boundaries. Four of them were formal gateways, at Madison Avenue, Lower Mount Royal, Eutaw Street, and Linden Avenue, designed and installed between 1868 and 1907 in the architectural language of the park itself. They were built to welcome the neighborhoods in.
Then the city put a highway between its own children and their park.
In 1948, Baltimore made Druid Hill Avenue and McCulloh Street one-way to speed suburban commuters downtown. Much of the city's Black elite lived on those two streets. Nobody consulted them. Residents reported cracks opening in their plaster walls from the traffic. They protested and lost.
The Druid Hill Expressway and the Jones Falls Expressway followed, turning Auchentoroly Terrace and Druid Park Lake Drive from two-lane, park-front residential streets into roadways five to nine lanes wide. Over 250 trees came down in the park to make room. The local NAACP and neighborhood associations opposed it.
This was not something done to Baltimore from outside. The City Council voted for it.
“The three of us approved the Druid Hill expressway because the welfare of the city was more important than the district feeling.”
Councilman Alpert, Fourth District, 1949
Their own constituents were the district.
Comparing maps from 1927 to 1964, Toole Design found the park's neighborhood access points reduced from eighteen to five. Today two pedestrian crosswalks cross Druid Park Lake Drive, at Linden and at Madison. Some of the historic gateways are still standing. BCRP's own plan says they no longer mark an invitation and instead mark the separation.
That construction landed on neighborhoods already being remade. Jewish families had been moving northwest for decades, and in the 1960s speculators accelerated it, inducing panic sales on white blocks and reselling to Black families at a markup. Black families arriving from the South were restricted in where they could live, and these were among the few neighborhoods open to them.
Then the investment stopped. The houses were subdivided, the services thinned, and the park across the street became unreachable on foot. Decades of that produced departures of a different kind. Between 2010 and 2020, Baltimore lost roughly 15 percent of its Black residents, most of them to the suburbs, and Reservoir Hill's population fell along with the rest.
Reservoir Hill, Penn North, Mondawmin, Woodbrook, and Auchentoroly Terrace are still cut off from their own park. Baltimore has since won six million federal dollars to plan a redesign of Druid Park Lake Drive.
The lake
Federal drinking water rules adopted in 2006, written to keep Cryptosporidium and other pathogens out of treated water, required the city to cover its open reservoir. Construction started in 2017, ran years behind, and took added EPA pressure to finish. For most of that stretch, the community lost access to that part of the park entirely.
What came out of it is two buried tanks, open water shrunk from fifty-five acres to thirty-three and freed entirely for recreation, and fourteen new acres of park on top of the tanks. The promenade loop reopened last year. BCRP's Druid Lake Vision Plan calls for a swimming area, a boat launch, a fishing pier, an amphitheater, shoreline trails, a pedestrian bridge, and an education building, with roughly a third of a mile of accessible shoreline. Design work has been underway, and construction is not yet funded past the first phase.
The plan also proposes restoring Druid Park Lake Drive to a two-lane parkway and reestablishing the historic neighborhood gateways. The city's own language for the project describes water access as a civic right.
Read the Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights next to that sentence. Every child in Baltimore has the right to splash in clean streams, ponds, rivers and the Bay, and the right to develop confidence in outdoor skills and recreation.
Why we started here
Druid Hill Park should be a beacon of outdoor education, and not only inside the zoo. Children should be learning in the conservatory among the plants. They should be in the forest with their hands in the soil, on the water in kayaks, and riding the loop around the lake.
This is not only about the children. Centering them is what makes the rest of it work. Put a child at the middle of a planning conversation and the adult squabbles lose their footing and the agencies stop defending turf, because nobody can argue for very long that a nine-year-old should breathe worse air. Children are the one constituency everybody claims. Hold everyone to that claim and you get decisions aimed at a long-term livable future rather than at this budget cycle.
The pattern Baltimore still lives inside was built at Druid Hill Park. The reform that got fired. The school that left. The gateways that closed. The neighborhoods held on the wrong side of the road. Every generation since has inherited the same arrangement: the education children were promised, available to whoever can pay for it or drive to it.
The children who would benefit most from that park live closest to it and reach it least.
Nature Everywhere Week spent two years at Druid Hill because a right nobody can exercise is not yet a right. This spring it expanded west, to Belmont Elementary and Leakin Park. The Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights is the demand Baltimore refused in 1911, made again, this time on behalf of all 76,362 children in its public schools.