Urbanites Drawn to Cumberland, Md., by Small-Town Potential
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Jorge Zamorano whipped out a copy of the Cumberland Times-News from behind the bar at the Starfish Cafe, one of two restaurants he owns on Capitol Hill.
The newspaper trumpeted a 17 percent increase in housing prices in the Western Maryland town over the past year. Zamorano, a Cuban-born artist and restaurateur, was pleased at his prescience.
Fourteen years ago, on a snowy Christmas vacation, he found himself in the mountain town, watching fat flakes swirl around the Victorian main street.
"I was mesmerized by the beauty of it," he said. "The first thought that came to mind was 'It's a Wonderful Life.' "
Then came the second thought: "What a shame, all the buildings boarded up and empty. This place in the right hands? The potential!"
Since then, a noticeable stream of outsiders from Washington and elsewhere have moved to Cumberland, a city of about 21,000 on the C&O Canal, to take advantage of low real estate prices and a slower lifestyle.
For Zamorano, it took 10 years of visits, watching Baltimore Street, the main drag, being revitalized by a National Trust for Historic Preservation Main Street project, before he lured his business partner, Miguel Rodriguez, to the town.
"I fell in love immediately," Rodriguez said.
They bought one building for a clone of Zamorano's other Capitol Hill restaurant, the Banana Cafe, but before construction began, Zamorano wanted to buy another.
The Manhattan Bar and Grill was the first of their two restaurants to open, four years ago. "It was the day after Thanksgiving, when they light the Christmas tree. It's a huge event in Cumberland," Zamorano said.
"Like Rockefeller Center," Rodriguez added. "There were 5,000 people out front. We ran out of food."
They now divide their time between Washington and Cumberland, switching off weeks, enjoying the town, forgetting the world.
"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?"
Davis lives in Cumberland full time, though Hart, like many of Cumberland's newer residents, is a commuter. He manages the Immunogenetics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, staying in that city four nights a week.
A guest wanders in and asks if she can see the basement bomb shelter, which was added in the 1950s. "We're slowly building a wine collection there because the temperature is so perfect," Hart said. It would be useless against radiation anyway, he added. The Rosenbaums put in plenty of air holes for ventilation.
"In suburban Baltimore," he said, "most people don't know who lives next door. You never talk to them. Up here? Bill and I entertain all the time. You can have two or three parties in an evening. It's a closer-knit community. When we first moved here, it would take me an hour to get somewhere because I kept running into people: 'How're you doing; how's your house?' It's like that."
Chuck and Terri Skinner's 8,000-square-foot house on Washington Street has 95 doors. There are pocket doors with glass panes, French doors, solid wood doors and closet doors with locks to prevent the servants from pilfering -- when there were servants.
There are five closets on the first landing. One holds the mop sink. "You don't see them anymore," Terri Skinner said. Or silver rooms, or valise rooms or 21-by-40-foot ballrooms with two crystal chandeliers.
How many bedrooms? Chuck Skinner ticked them off on his fingers, reaching six and hesitating. "Seven?"
"Eight," his wife corrected as they sat in the dining room, where French doors frame a glimpse of the veranda that spans the rear of the house and a view over sloping hills to the mountains.
The house was rather beaten up when they bought it a year and a half ago, she said. A doctor's family had owned it for many years, and the kids ran wild. "They wrote on the walls, rode mattresses down the staircases and shot BB guns into the plaster. . . . I think when they moved, the house sighed."
The Skinners were living in Ellicott City, Chuck working in aerospace engineering in Beltsville, Terri for an association. She traveled much of the week, which she still does. He is now retired and spends his days restoring the house.
Both knew Cumberland before they moved there. He grew up in the town but moved after high school, in 1959. In those days, many people did. "You had to leave -- move to the city to get work. . . . It's not a pretty story," he said.
Cumberland was once the second-largest city in Maryland, said Ben Wolters, the Skinners' neighbor. "That's why it's called the Queen City. Baltimore was number one, Cumberland number two."
Once, there were 55,000 people living there and 150 trains coming through each day. "They found coal and iron ore and clay to make firebrick. You want a pizza oven? Firebrick!" Wolters said.
"George Washington had his headquarters here," Chuck Skinner added. "They sent Washington to protect the area because the French and the British were trying to claim everything beyond it. The Ohio country, they called it -- way out west."
In the early years of the 20th century, the town was bustling, with big factories on the perimeter and department stores, banks and restaurants downtown.
Then came leaner times. When Wolters, a pilot, arrived in 1977 to work at the town's small airport, "it was a low point in the Cumberland economy," he said. "Kelly-Springfield tires shut down, PPG, Celanese. . . . By 1978, '79, it started going fast."
Wolters, who works for a major airline and commutes to Ohio, stayed on. He married a local woman, Mary Joe, and restored a shambles of a four-unit apartment building to make it a 5,500-square-foot single-family house.
In the past decade, factories have reopened, disenchanted urbanites have been lured by attractive incentives to restore downtown buildings, telecommuters and weekenders have snapped up reasonably priced housing, and early retirees have found second lives as art entrepreneurs.
One thing not in flux: Cumberland's front-porch friendliness. "From a good part of Cumberland, you can walk to whatever you need. We wouldn't really have to have a car," Terri Skinner said. "We'll walk downtown to go out to dinner, come back, and Ben and Mary Joe are sitting on the porch, and they'll say, 'Come on up and have a drink!'
"And then it's, 'Ah, it's getting late; let's order a pizza.' Hours later, we're still visiting with the neighbors."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.