Wyman Park Dell at 29th St

Wyman Park Dell at 29th St. . , In the late 1800s, the sharp corners of a booming city elbowed into the soft edges of streams and rolling fields., New housing blocks and factories sprawled chaotically across Baltimore’s pastoral fringes. In the face of this relentless development, the Citizens’ Improvement Association of North Baltimore and landowner William Wyman petitioned to preserve a portion of the Sumwalt Run valley here north of 29th Street for use as a public park., In 1902 Baltimore hired pioneering landscape architects Olmsted Brothers Co. to plan a network of greenways and parks throughout the growing city. The Olmsteds specialized in designing public green spaces woven into the urban grid, a radical idea at the time. Firm founder Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. advocated that “exposure to natural scenery” improved people’s mental and physical health, a theory now confirmed by modern research., Part of the Olmsted plan recommended preserving Baltimore’s stream valleys, including parts of Sumwalt Run, as links in a green necklace of parks draped across the city. Early sketches for Wyman Park Dell show wooded paths and footbridges crossing Sumwalt Run as it flowed through the park. But before this plan could be realized, unchecked development blasted north, burying sections of the stream below the streets and rowhomes of Charles Village, and destroying natural landscapes that the Olmsteds had hoped to preserve. Forced to scale back their vision of wooded valleys and parkways winding across the city, the Olmsteds instead chose to bury Sumwalt Run’s remaining aboveground fragment beneath a large, curving lawn, creating a more manicured urban oasis here at the Dell.,

"There, at Saint Paul and Thirtieth Streets, as I very well remember, stood a steep bank, on the southern side of the run, overgrown with beech trees and very beautiful." , , William B. Marye, 1959