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Main Street Turns a Corner
Jorge Zamorano, left, and Miguel Rodriguez branched out from two restaurants on Capitol Hill to open two more in Cumberland.
(By Stephanie Cavanaugh For The Washington Post)
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"Last Saturday, I went biking on the towpath," Zamorano said. "I go to restaurants, the theater, and there's really great jazz and blues. There's the Thursday farmers market on the mall, jazz weekends, the Arts Walk, Deep Creek Lake.
"Or I'll sit downtown with a glass of wine and just look at the architecture."
At 2 p.m. on a sunny spring Sunday, John Hart, another relative newcomer, mixed margaritas for guests while his partner, Bill Davis, propped himself on a stool at the work island.
"The kitchen is the least impressive room in the house," Hart said, fighting the scream of the blender. "When this kitchen was built, people weren't hanging in it like they do today. It's functional, but nice."
Davis and Hart are refugees from the Baltimore suburbs. They have lived in Cumberland since 1999. They moved into their 12,000-square-foot house five years ago, trading up from a 6,000-square-foot home a few blocks away.
Built in 1926 for the Rosenbaum family, then the owners of the fanciest department store in town, the house cost $60,000 to construct. "I have the receipts," Hart said.
"This house in Baltimore would be 5 or 6 million dollars. It cost $400,000," Davis said gleefully.
Moving to Cumberland was a bit of serendipity. Davis was an anesthesiologist at Baltimore's Sinai Hospital. "I got way over the city life," he said. "It was too corporate-minded and too crazy a commute. You got home from work . . . and you were so stressed out at the end of the week that all you wanted to do was sit on your back porch and drink."
Which is what they're doing now. But, he said: "At least here we do it with other people that we really know. I'm serious! I have more friends here that I'm closer with than I ever did in Baltimore."
On a whim, Davis posted his résumé on the Internet and quickly got a call about a job opening. "And I'm like: 'Cumberland. Where in the heck is Cumberland?' I've been living in this state all my life, and I don't know where Cumberland is.
"Anyway, then they described where it was, and I went, 'Well, I don't think so.' "
But he drove up one snowy February day and, he said, "it was glorious, peaceful and the roads were all nicely plowed, because they can handle snow up here, and I go into the hospital and everybody was pleasant. They like their jobs; there's a beautiful view of the town through the windows; and it was just idyllic . . . and what have I got to lose?"
