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This small community of perhaps one thousand families owes its name to the roads which bisect it. Bounded on the north by Warrenton Road, the east by Charles Street, the south by University Parkway and the west by Linkwood Road, Tuscany-Canterbury is located just north of The Johns Hopkins University and west of Guilford. Tuscany-Canterbury is predominantly a neighborhood of apartment buildings -- garden variety, Tudor-style mid-rise, and high-rise -- which have been built throughout the twentieth century. Distinctive brick Tudor group homes are clustered in the west along Tuscany and Ridgemede Roads, while more traditional American groups have been built in the east on Canterbury and Cloverhill Roads, below West Highfield Road.
For more than two centuries the history of the area was associated with the Merryman family. in 1694 Charles Merryman received a grant of 220 acres, called "Merryman's Addition." It encompassed land on both sides of, but mostly north of, Universitv Parkway. Along with Nicholas Haile as partner, he also held other nearby tracts. These passed through the family and by 1799 the estate north of Merryman's Lane (today's University Parkway) at Charles Street (not extant at the time) included approximately 150 acres and a frame house.
In 1877 Canterbury Road was in place, though called Melrose Avenue. By the end of the century a large quarry was being dug east of the Stony Run and north of Merryman's Lane. About a dozen homes were constructed in the second half of the nineteenth centurv along the west side of Charles Street Avenue, which was extended north of Merryman's Lane in 1854. These long, narrow low-frontage lots matched the usual configuration of settlement that often accompanied a toll road. Farther west and still north of Merryman's Lane, Richard Capron, a landowner and future director of the Roland Park Company, owned the "Woodcliff" estate, while much other property was held by C. J. Meister.
By 1914 Merryman's Lane had been renamed University Parkway, and a streetcar line served it and St. Paul Street. The properties of Capron and Meister had been subdivided into lots, some of which already contained brick houses and apartment buildings. Canterbury Hall and Tudor Hall, both apartment complexes, and the Christian Science Temple had all been built. A small rotary called University Circle had been planned for the present Tuscany Road.
This community contains numerous large apartment buildings and other landmarks, mostly along Charles Street northwest of University Parkway. The Scottish Rite Temple of Freemasonry was designed in 1932 by Clyde N. Friz in consultation with noted architect John Russell Pope. Constructed in Corinthian neoclassic style, the columns and barrel vault of the portico make the building monumental in scale. The Highfield House, at the southwest corner of Highfield Road and Charles Street, was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1964. Like his first building in Baltimore, One Charles Center, it is a free-standing tower set on a platform. This reinforced concrete structure was designed with the character of the neighborhood in mind. Thus, due to wide horizontal window openings and the use of traditional brick, its height of thirteen stories seems less noticeable in an area of moderate-sized apartment house and individual homes.
The Ascot House, designed in 1912 by Laurence Hall Fowler, who planned the War Memorial downtown, was located on 39th Street until its demolition in the early 1980s. An excellent example of contemporary English domestic architecture, this building contributed much to the early twentieth-century character of this community.
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