Edmondson Village

Location

Boundaries to Edmondson Village run clockwise from Athol and Old Frederick on Old Frederick, Pen Lucy, Uplands Parkway, Edmondson Avenue, Swann, Rokeby Road, northeast on a line parallel to and southwest of Walnut, and Athol to Old Frederick.

Boundaries of Lyndhurst (a community with Edmondson Village) run colockwise from Rokeby Road, Mt. Holly Street, Edmondson Avenue, and Wildwood Parkway.

History

Much of the acreage stood on the eighteenth-century estate of General John Swan and mid-nineteenth-century estate of William Frick. Scottish born Swan, an Anne Arundel County estate owner, secured a 1000 acre section of the estate of Tory Daniel Dulaney. He eventually helped organize the Franklin Road Turnpike Company. A part of the property passed into the hands of Edward Austin Jenkins in 1881. A stone lodge house built either by Dulaney or Swan near Old Frederick Road sat on the site of Edmondson Shopping Center until 1946. Its unusual cypress and pecan trees and the wainscoted dining room of the estate house won it local renown.

Some 997 units of the Uplands Apartments spread over eight irregularly shaped blocks south of Edmondson in the early 1950s, a complex remodeled in the 1980s as subsidized housing. The Edmondson Village Shopping Center went up on an eleven acre site in 1947 as one of the nation's first planned suburban shopping centers. Local builders Joseph and Jacob Meyerhoff built it in the style of Colonial Williamsburg, such that the building's architecture suggested stability and tradition even as the project encouraged entirely new consumer behavior and habits on the Westside. Twenty-nine stores were built set back from the street and a sunken garage to hold 700 automobiles accommodated commuters. Recreational destinations -- a theater and bowling alley -- were located among the stores. The architectural features lent a distinctly non-commercial, residential quality to the shopping experience: trees and shrubbery surrounded the area, chimneys were placed for decorative purposes alone, and slate roofs and a variety of bay and dormer windows were put on upper floors to mimic those in private homes. To acquaint and adjust consumers to the new mode of purchasing, a clubroom for neighborhood activities was opened. Local department stores maintained branches such as Hochschild Kohn in the Center and the Hecht Company across from it on Edmondson; the latter facility was eventually acquired by the city and converted to a vocational skills center to serve six high schools.