‘A once in a lifetime opportunity’
Nonprofit purchases Roland Park land with hopes of creating an inclusive recreational space
Walkers, nature lovers and student-athletes are about to gain another public park as the Baltimore Country Club prepares to sell its former golf course and tennis courts to a private neighborhood foundation.
The newly named Hillside Park, 20 acres of sloping woods and lawn off the 4800 block of Falls Road, was once Baltimore’s premier private course. The fairways, greens and lawn tennis courts attracted a handful of top athletes, as well as the city’s business and social elite, for more than 70 years.
The future holds otherwise — an egalitarian plan to create a largely passive recreation space open to all in the Jones Falls watershed. Envisioned are public walking trails, woodland sanctuaries and athletic fields to be shared with schools, all on a public bus line.
Both buyer and seller declined to release the purchase price.
“We paid a generous price,” said David Tufaro, a longtime Roland Park resident who was part of the team who worked to acquire the property. He and fellow neighbors successfully solicited contributions.
Many of the donors live nearby in Roland Park, while others reside in other neighborhoods. Some raised their children in Roland Park and moved on, but sent money anyway.
“We’ve had gifts of $100 to $50,000, and several $100,000 contributions,” said Tufaro, a real estate developer who preserved Mill No. 1 and the Whitehall Mill, both about a mile south of Hillside Park.
“It is hard to value a property not being put to market use,” said Tufaro, a former president of the Roland Park Community Foundation. “We see it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
To date, more than 600 donors have contributed $8.5 million toward the park purchase plan. The organizers want to find an additional $1 million in gifts, plus $2 million to establish an endowment for perpetual park maintenance and care.
Roland Park residents say that part of
their mission is to create a place of inclusion. In the decades of racial and religious restrictions, sales agents for the Roland Park Co. often steered away home shoppers who they deemed unworthy of living there.
“In a neighborhood with a history of exclusion, this is an expression for the future,” said Mary Page Michel, chair of the Roland Park Community Foundation’s board.
She also said: “We care for our students — at Poly and Western and Roland Park Elementary and Middle and the independent schools, too. We’d like to get them engaged as park stewards.”
crossings, in part due to Nicaraguans fleeing repression, crime and poverty in their country. They are among migrants from four countries who are now subject to quick expulsion under new rules enacted by the Biden administration in the past week.
Biden’s announcement on border security and his visit to the border are aimed in part at quelling the political noise and blunting the impact of upcoming investigations into immigration promised by House Republicans.
But any solution will require action by the sharply divided Congress, where multiple efforts to enact sweeping changes have failed in recent years.
From El Paso, Biden was to continue to Mexico City, where he and the leaders of Mexico and Canada will gather Monday and Tuesday for a North American leaders summit.
In El Paso, where migrants congregate at bus stops and in parks before traveling on, border patrol agents stepped up security before Biden’s visit.
“I think they’re trying to send a message that they’re going to more consistently check people’s documented status, and if you have not been processed, they are going to pick you up,” said Ruben Garcia of the Annunciation House aid group in El Paso.
Migrants and asylum- seekers fleeing violence and persecution have increasingly found that protections in the United States are available primarily to those with money or the savvy to find someone to vouch for them financially.
Venezuelan migrant Jose Castillo, who said he traveled without family members for five months from his home on Margarita Island to arrive in El Paso on Dec. 29, said he hoped Biden “will take us into consideration as the human beings we are.”
Castillo was among a group of about 30 migrants who gathered for prayers Sunday outside the Sacred Heart Catholic Church where many of the newcomers have been camping.
“I know that we are here illegally, but please give us a chance,” Castillo said.
The numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically during Biden’s first two years in office. There were more than 2.38 million stops during the year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take hard-line measures that would resemble those of former President Donald Trump’s administration.
The policy changes announced last week are Biden’s biggest move yet to contain illegal border crossings and will turn away tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border. At the same time, 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela will get the chance to come to the U.S. legally as long as they travel by plane, get a sponsor and pass background checks.
Officials will also turn away migrants who do not seek asylum first in a country they traveled through en route to the U.S.
Migrants are being asked to complete a form on a phone app so that they can go to a port of entry at a pre-scheduled date and time.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the administration is trying to “incentivize a safe and orderly way and cut out the smuggling organizations,” saying the policies are “not a ban at all” but an attempt to protect migrants from the trauma that smuggling can create.