Beautiful architecture amid nature's bounty

Guilford is simply one of Baltimore's premier neighborhoods.

The stately mansions.

The beautifully landscaped gardens.

And the sun-dappled lots that fairly reek of both old and new money, trust funds, success in business, medicine, law or education, fine antiques and artwork.

Guilford's streets are lined with an eclectic architectural stock that includes sumptuous Georgian, Tudor and even Spanish-style homes right out of the Norma Desmond-Sunset Boulevard era. The most fashionable Northern European-made automobiles, the preferred mode of transport, are parked in its driveways.

It is, in a word, the tenderloin.

Since its inception in 1913 when the first lots went on sale, Guilford has managed to retain its desirability and physical beauty despite social upheaval and urban flight.

"Guilford has some of the finest examples of architecture in town," said J. Carroll Boone, a real estate agent with Hill & Co. of Cross Keys.

"It is a nice place to live, and buyers run the gamut from professionals to educators. It's convenient to schools, shopping, downtown, the airport and railroad station," he said.

One of Guilford's newest and high visibility residents is Mark L. Perkins, who took over as president of Towson University this summer. He will move into a 5,800-square-foot home on Greenway near 39th Street, that cost $850,000.

In his 1951 book, The Amiable Baltimoreans, Francis F. Beirne wrote of Guilford:

"From the point where University Parkway crosses Charles Street the city assumes a semirural character. ... When, around the turn of the century, the real estate developers stepped in, they used rare insight in preserving the giant oaks and tulip poplars that were the crowning glory of the neighborhood.

"The houses here are built well apart and surrounded by spacious lawns and shade trees. There is so much cover that wildlife is attracted to it. Within 10 minutes by automobile from the very center of the city it is not at all unusual to encounter squirrels, rabbits, an occasional opossum and owls. Every once in a while a deer wanders into town," he wrote.

"Guilford is probably the best suburb in America, if only because of the predominance of Georgian red brick. Most of its houses are not only completely designed; they show clearly that they are in Baltimore and not Buffalo, Cincinnati, or Los Angeles," wrote H.L. Mencken in 1929 in The Evening Sun.