Customer Reviews

Baltimore's Historic Parks and Gardens (MD) (Images of America)

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I love the "Images of America" series. These are good books for the price, and they make for an excellent intro to almost any aspect of local history. I've come to expect certain things from Arcadia: well-selected, high-quality pictures, relevant information, and reasonably well-written captions.

The present book barely covers my first two expectations. Pictures like the Druid Hill Mansion on page 44 and Cylburn Mansion on 56 are amateur. But what disappoints most are the captions. They are for the most part poor and effortless. Few are more than a line. Under the Cylburn Mansion picture, the caption reads, "The mansion house is glowing in winter 2003." First of all, mansion is a noun. But really, how helpful is that caption? What does it add? Then, on page 21, under a picture of a pond, the caption reads "This is the fish pond, c. 1870." That's lazy, and unacceptable. Some are just badly written. On page 67, a caption reads, "This photo shows the original greenhouse built by Hopkins, c. 1900." That sentence plainly says that Hopkins built a greenhouse in 1900, just 27 years after he died.

That being said, the book has some useful chapter intros (most are not written by the author), but they vary a good deal in quality. The intro to Wyman Park states that the Olmstead brothers "carefully planned the new Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus for the estate of William Wyman." This is wrong. Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. was on the advisory committee for the new JHU campus in 1902; the plan was done by Parker and Thomas in 1904.

This book was poorly done. I expect much better from Arcadia Press.

I find this little book quite interesting and engaging. It's packed with photographs of bygone eras documenting the past. Understandably the photos are all black and white with many of them a century old. Among the sites included are Druid Hill Park, Cylburn Arboretum, Herring Run Park, Federal Hill, Carroll Park, and Mt. Vernon.

My favorite section is that of Federal Hill with photos of the Civil War era. The Fort McHenry chapter is disappointingly sparse, but enjoyable just the same.

Interested in Baltimore history? You might like adding this volume to your personal library.