Here's a house-buying fairy tale.
Five years ago, Mary Ellen and Bruce Johnson were taking an after-dinner walk from their 38th Street home. They rounded the corner and there it was. They spied a house for sale in Wyman Park and fell in love with it. Even though they weren't in the market to buy, they found themselves going to contract three days later for the house on Tudor Arms Avenue.
"I guess it's the ultimate impulse buy," said Mary Ellen, sitting on her bench in the front lawn watching a soccer game across the street in the 40-acre park. Cars were parked on the field, a few players were plunked down on the grass. That's Wyman Park -- very casual.
Then out of the trail came a gray-haired woman, struggling to ride a bike -- a skill until now she'd never quite mastered.
Kate Stebe and Joe Sclafani, on their stoop with glasses of wine in hand, watched the cherry blossoms in the afternoon sunshine on their part of the park on Gilman Terrace. They got their wedding pictures taken out front by the park.
Wyman Park somehow fuses the bucolic with the cosmopolitan, a yuppie feel with a roll-up-the-sleeve work ethic.
Nestled between Hampden and the Stony Run basin, Wyman Park is one of those neighborhoods that reveals itself every so often to people who count themselves lucky for having discovered its charm.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the area remained attached to large rural estates and the only settlement of note occurred in the adjacent Stony Run valley. In fact, two flour mills once operated in the area.
In the late 1800s, a popular tavern, known as Biddy Rice's Saloon, operated along the tracks opposite Bottle Hill, where the Tudor Arms Apartments now stand.
Just talk with anyone in the seven-block-long, three-block-wide strip overlooking the glen and the Johns Hopkins University campus and they'll act as if they've found a long-lost oasis of city life.
For the last few years the next crop of professionals have been moving in, mixing well with the old-timers.
Dennis Byrne, president of the community association, was among an earlier wave of newcomers who moved to Wyman Park to find a neighborhood filled with people who would sit on their porches and recall when the Northern Police barracks was the Equestrian Police barracks, where officers on horseback would change shifts.
"It was about 1932 when they got their first cars," said John Sunderland, 77, who has lived all his life in Wyman Park.
