They hired the Olmsted Brothers to lay out the second tract, and installed expensive infrastructure, including graded-streets, gutters, sidewalks, and constructed the Lake Roland Elevated Railroad.

Bouton took 100 acres of land a few miles north of Downtown Baltimore and sold it as an exclusive, lush “garden suburb”, free of city grime and racial diversity.

[10] Letters from the time show that Bouton asked a law firm, Schmuker & Whitelock, if he could legally restrict who bought property in Roland Park.

This prohibition, however, is not intended to include occupancy by a negro domestic servant.” [10] Additionally, Bouton claimed that he did not sell to Jews, as they were “undesirable”, at the 1914 Annual Conference of the Development of High-Class Residential Property, further demonstrating the levels of exclusion in the emerging city suburbs.

Employees of the Roland Park Company would later go on to serve on national boards, such as the Federal Housing Administration, which helped normalize and standardize the practice of redlining throughout the country.

[10] Though the Supreme Court ruled against the enforceability of racially restrictive deeds in 1948, segregation and redlining remained prevalent in Roland Park and throughout other areas of Baltimore City through the 1950s and up until today.

In the early 1940s and ‘50s, Baltimore City and the federal government undertook housing development projects displacing African-American populations into inner-city, high-rise buildings that were, essentially, created to reinforce the patterns of neighborhood segregation that emerged in the late 1800s.

Developed by Roland Park Company President Edward Bouton and designed by Wyatt and Nolting, it was originally planned as an apartment and office building with a “community room” for civic functions on the upper level.