By: Greg Hanscom


Damage control: Water seeping in through a leaky roof has ruined ornate plasterwork in Johns Hopkins’ historic dining room. | Photo by Shelby Silvernell

Walking the grounds at the Clifton Mansion in its namesake park in East Baltimore, you can’t help but wonder what Johns Hopkins would say if he knew that his stately summer home—the one he imagined would some day stand amid the university that bears his name—was boarded up like a vacant rowhouse. The mansion is an Italianate villa, replete with a six-story tower where Hopkins could watch ships come and go from Baltimore Harbor. Today, many of the first-floor windows and doors are covered in plywood, the pillars around the porch are rotten, and the stucco facade
is dissolving.

“The original estimate—I think it was done around 1998—said [restoring the building] was going to cost five to six million,” says Chris Wilson, a carpenter with the nonprofit Civic Works who has been working on the building for the past decade. “My best guess is that it’s going to be closer to $20 million.”

Upon his death in 1873, Hopkins left the university trustees $3.5 million and his 500-acre Clifton estate in what was then unincorporated countryside. Historical accounts suggest that Hopkins assumed the university would be located at Clifton, according to University archivist Jim Stimpert. But the trustees turned instead to the Homewood area, two miles to the west. The story has it that they made the switch because housing and transportation were available at Homewood, but Wilson guesses the decision had more to do with Clifton’s proximity to the city’s brewing district and watering holes unbecoming to its highbrow students. (“One of the occupational hazards of the job is that I’ve become a Hopkins historian,” he says.)

In any event, following Hopkins’ death, the university turned parts of the Clifton estate into playing fields for its sports teams. The mansion became the locker room. In 1895, the city bought the property, adding tennis courts, a swimming pool, a golf course, and the Lake Clifton High School. The mansion served as the Parks and Recreation headquarters for a time, and an office for the park police, as well as the golf course pro shop and a soda fountain.




Forgotten treasure: Restoration carpenter Chris Wilson points to a mural of the Bay of Naples unearthed in Johns Hopkins’ historic summer home, the Clifton Mansion. | Photo by Shelby Silvernell




By the time Civic Works moved into the mansion in 1993 (paying a dollar a year in rent), the building had suffered a century of insults. Since then, the youth work corps has struggled to hold the line against the forces of entropy and decay. Wilson, who built stage props and window displays in past lives, has made headway on the interior with help from a merry band of unpaid grunt laborers. They’ve painstakingly stripped the paint from the majestic black walnut staircase and uncovered a mural in the stairway that shows the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius smoking on the horizon. (Wilson learned of the mural, which was buried under up to nine layers of paint, from an 1871 newspaper story.) They’ve unearthed and re-created stenciled designs on walls and ceilings. The original dining room, which had been turned into a men’s bathroom, was restored as a meeting space. Wilson has also rebuilt the observation deck on the roof of the tower, which offers a commanding view of the city and the harbor—if not, as legend has it, the capitol building in Annapolis.

From the outside, however, the mansion looks little better than it did sixteen years ago. The city chipped in to replace the main roof, but the porch roof is still a sieve—thus the rotting pillars. Cost estimates put the price of a new roof at $200,000. Wilson thinks he could do it for considerably less, using new roofing technology and volunteer labor, but the money has yet to materialize. In 2007, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, but the listing hasn’t brought in any additional preservation money. The work to date has been funded—to the tune of $1 million—by state and city dollars, small grants, and donations from the heirs of both Hopkins and his fellow merchant banker, Henry Thompson, who built the original home in 1801. 

Wilson admits he’s frustrated with the lack of support from one quarter: “I find it really amazing that neither the university or the med school have shown any interest in preserving the last remnant of their founder’s lifetime,” he says. University engineers did do a pro-bono structural report on the tower, but Amy Lunday, Johns Hopkins senior media relations representative, says the Homewood House and the Evergreen House, both of which are operated by the university as museums, “are our primary concerns.”

At this rate, Wilson guesses it could take another fifty years to fully restore the Clifton Mansion to its former glory. He seems
content to chip away at the work, but he better finish the tower first. “I probably won’t be able to climb many steps in fifty years,” he says. 

—Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor.




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