MLK Boulevard can coexist along a major new park

From BaltimoreBrew.com - October 16, 2014

Reviving the West Side can start by reducing the footprint of MLK Blvd.

How to turn the thoroughfare’s wasted land into a campus-like park while retaining its existing traffic lanes

Above: The basic elements of an elegant linear park already exist along Martin Luther King Boulevard. They just need to be strengthened and unified.

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Can we have a classic leafy-green college campus right here in downtown Baltimore?

The University of Maryland almost has it, but in their zeal to create an “innovation landscape,” they’ve missed the ivy right under their feet.

The University’s and the West Side’s most vexing physical problem is how to bridge Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The solution is to pare down its oversized right-of-way and take advantage of its lush green periphery to create a new campus and neighborhood focal point.

Remarkably, this can be done without cutting into the busy roadway and disrupting the current flow of traffic. Under the plan detailed below, all six of the existing through traffic lanes will be retained.

Reworking perimeter barriers like MLK Boulevard into a series of active linear parks has the power to bring West Baltimore into the city’s growing network of desirable downtown neighborhoods.

Held Back by Highways

Until around 1980, West Baltimore held its own. East Baltimore was still under the cloud of a looming expressway, and the Hollins Market area was vying with Fells Point to be the center of Baltimore’s hipster bohemian culture.

As for gentrification, it was no contest – the West Side’s Union Square was the clear winner over southeast neighborhoods like Butchers Hill or Canton.

Then the southeast was liberated from the expressway threat while Poppleton, Harlem Park and Greater Rosemont were upended by the “Highway to Nowhere,” an isolated segment of I-70 rammed between Franklin and Mulberry streets.

The decline of the west began in earnest.

The construction of MLK, a leftover of the Franklin-Mulberry boondoggle, created a series of fragmented properties that have been turned into small isolated parks and redevelopments of varying relevance. While most of the open spaces are really quite lush and beautiful, none have created sufficient energy to significantly improve the community as a whole.

The original plan to build a full-scale expressway in the MLK corridor left excess land along the western periphery of the roadway. Turning this into an active park would reduce the barrier effect of the street. (Google Earth)

The Downtown Partnership has recognized this problem and recently suggested that the various MLK parks would be more useful if upgraded and linked.

That is exactly the solution. But it will only work if it is done in a very strong and forceful way. The tectonic force of downtown’s eastward drift is far too strong for weak half-hearted measures.

Integrating MLK’s open space network to the University of Maryland would ensure that it is integrated with the west side as a whole.

Design Guidelines

Some of the keys to adopting this approach include:

• Making the development density along MLK Boulevard as intense and active as possible to counteract the divisive impact of the highway and convey that this corridor relates intimately to downtown. The University of Maryland and the Biopark should direct as much of their future large-scale growth to the MLK corridor to the greatest degree possible, while focusing on small-scale uses along Baltimore Street and its vicinity.

• Making the park system as linear as possible, which translates into making it as active and extroverted as possible, notably for biking, jogging and simply creating the maximum overall reach. Some of the existing park spaces are quite inwardly focused, and while this is OK, it does not contribute much to the overall desired effect. The north end of this park system could be anchored by the beautiful iconic gazebo park at Heritage Crossing.

• Further activating MLK Boulevard by reviving the plan to put the light-rail Red Line there, as it was throughout the Draft Environmental Impact Statement process and in the resultant “Locally Preferred Alternative.” The Red Line was moved to Fremont because of engineering problems with a tunnel alignment originating from MLK. However, costs have since exploded and the Fremont homeowners have sued the MTA for changing the plan in violation of the community process.

Cutting out the Flab

Downsizing MLK Boulevard can be done with no appreciable impact on traffic flow, and at a cost that is commensurate with the value of the land created.

This prototype motif showing the relationship between development, local access street, linear park and light rail – from the proposed “First Mile” corridor north of Carroll Park – suggest ways to develop the MLK park. (Courtesy of Marc Szarkowski)

The existing east (downtown) edge of the highway could be kept as is, since there is very little wasted land on that side anyway.

All six of the existing through traffic lanes and all the left turn lanes should be retained.

The narrowing can be accomplished by greatly reducing the width of the median strip and eliminating most of the pavement devoted to right turn lanes, all of which are grossly underutilized. The width of the remaining lanes could also be reduced for more narrowing.

The current median width is typically about 36 feet. It can be reduced to 16 feet while still accommodating all the left turn lanes and leaving a sufficient six-foot pedestrian refuge. Wider pedestrian refuges just make it harder to cross the street.

Between Baltimore and Lombard Streets, there are continuous right-turn lanes in both direction that can be eliminated to reduce the overall width by an additional 24 feet, for a total narrowing of 44 feet. South of Lombard, there is a northbound right-turn lane that can be eliminated to reduce the width by 12 more feet for a total narrowing of about 32 feet.

So anywhere from about 20 to 50 feet of new land can be created along the west side of MLK Boulevard for a far bigger, better and more continuous linear park.

The ultimate goal is to add value to the whole West Side, tie it better into downtown and allow UMB to serve as the anchor and institutional catalyst for revival.
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Gerald Neily is a former transportation planner at the Baltimore Department of Planning.

B&O Mount Clare "First Mile" Plan (from The Brew)

COMMENTARYBY MARC SZARKOWSKI AND GERALD NEILY7:13 AMFEB 18, 20140

Turning Carroll Park into a Harbor Point for the rest of us

Instead of acting as a “border vacuum,” historic rail corridor could transform the park into an anchor for southwest Baltimore

Above: How Mount Street would look opened up to Carroll Park’s Mount Clare Mansion.Share on Facebook

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In the 1960s, as everyone knows, the yet-to-be-named Inner Harbor was a dreary landscape of derelict warehouses, old piers and end-stage industrial sites like the Allied Chemical plant.

A border vacuum. That’s what urban visionary Jane Jacobs called such soul-sucking, community-defeating places.

Since then, Baltimore has focused on revitalizing its waterfront, inspiring copy-cat versions in cities around the globe and continual local efforts to replicate the magic – most recently atop the chromium-laced remnants of the Allied Chemical plant (which has been renamed Harbor Point).

But the revitalization strategy for inland areas of the city should really be no different than for the waterfront – fighting border vacuums. The wonderful-but-struggling north edge of Carroll Park is a prime example.

Like the harbor, Carroll Park is beautiful and full of fascinating historical lore. It’s got Baltimore’s grandest colonial home, the Mount Clare Mansion, for instance and the “First Mile” of the B&O railroad – the birthplace of American railroading – runs right along the northern edge of the park.

The currently-isolated Mount Clare Mansion should be the area’s anchor. (Photo by Brian Babcock, BeMore Photography)

Unfortunately, this historic rail corridor completely cuts West Baltimore off from the park and the iconic mansion. Pigtown enjoys easy access to Carroll Park from the east and south, but communities like Mount Clare, Carrollton Ridge, Union Square and Steuart Hill are out of luck.

The historic “First Mile” railroad corridor cuts west Baltimore communities off from Carroll Park. (Marc Szarkowski illustration.)

How cruelly ironic that a railroad corridor that helped unify an entire continent still walls off the communities in which it was born!

Further evidence of this painful irony can be seen in the blocks immediately to the north of Carroll Park – the closer they are to the park and mansion, the worse condition they’re in.

This is quite contrary to typical park-neighborhood synergy, in which the blocks closest to a park tend to be the strongest, as is the case with Patterson Park.

At the end of Mount Street, a wall of debris cuts the park off from the neighborhood. (Photo by Gerald Neily)

Only Connect!

Fortunately, there are ways to solve this problem, and people in the community are actively exploring them.

We offer here our approach, a proposal we developed with support from The Warnock Foundation. The foundation recently established The Baltimore Social Innovation Journal to solicit, discuss and support ideas for improving Baltimore. Our proposal for redoing the northern edge of Carroll Park is one of 13 ideas profiled in the journal’s inaugural issue.

It’s clear that people want to access the park from the north despite official prohibitions on trespassing. There’s evidence in the form of what planners call “desire trails, or unofficial, tramped-down, ad hoc paths that usually represent the shortest distance between two places.

On our many visits to the area, we have noticed accompanying homemade directional signs (see below) and have frequently spotted pedestrians and bicyclists using them.

Looking south across the tracks from the intersection of Stricker and Cole streets, where access to Carroll Park is officially prohibited but strongly desired and informally promoted. (Photo/illustration by Marc Szarkowski)

The solution to this particular border vacuum is the same as that deployed along the harbor: the northern edge of the park needs to be turned into a people place.

That is, the northern side of Carroll Park needs to have an active, permeable urban enclosure, which is what the eastern and southern sides already have.

To create the initial connection, Mount Clare’s dead-ended Fulton Avenue and Mount Street could be extended right into Carroll Park, as suggested in the illustration at the top of this story. This would allow the Mount Clare Mansion to assume its natural role as the neighborhood’s focal point, thus drawing people in.

A new parkfront avenue running along the historic B&O tracks could celebrate the “First Mile” of American railroading and supply Mount Clare with a well-defined park edge, parkside promenade and local main street.

“The First Mile,” re-imagined. (Brian Babcock photo. Illustration by Marc Szarkowski)

This “First Mile Avenue” would be incrementally extended along the entire northern edge of the park: the iconic B&O roundhouse would serve as the eastern anchor while Montgomery Park, the city’s largest office building, would serve as the western anchor, as suggested in this diagram.

A “First Mile Corridor” would stitch it all together. (Illustration by Marc Szarkowski)

Excuse us, CSX, We’re Playing Through!

Carroll Park could even be connected to the “out of sight, out of mind” Carroll Park Golf Course via a strategically-bermed clubhouse portal passing under the CSX tracks – the Olmsted brothers proposed such a connection way back in 1907. The course could then be re-oriented and re-branded to make it a true urban golf course.

This would allow the Gwynns Falls Trail to run along the edge of the course, through the portal, and through the park, thus opening up to all of Baltimore the magnificent and bucolic Gwynns Falls Valley and its amazing attractions – like the soaring Carrollton Viaduct, the continent’s oldest railroad bridge still in use.

The Carrollton Viaduct is another overlooked historic gem in the proposed First Mile corridor. (Wikimedia)

The First Mile corridor is owned by the B&O Railroad Museum, which would like to make it more attractive. John Ott, the museum’s first director, envisioned transforming the corridor into the “Williamsburg of Railroading.”

But challenged by several concerns – like strict federal safety regulations, security issues and recovering from the roundhouse roof collapse of a decade ago – the museum has understandably moved slowly towards this goal.

The museum infrequently runs tourist trains on the corridor, so it is subject to the same federal regulations that apply to “Class I” railroads like CSX. At-grade crossing is stringently regulated and discouraged – hence the “no trespassing” signs plastered all along the corridor.

It would therefore seem that Mount Clare’s need for frequent, at-grade, street-dependent access to Carroll Park is in direct conflict with federal regulations that severely restrict such access.

So to realize the dream of giving this rail corridor the Historic Williamsburg treatment means rethinking what kind of “railroad” the First Mile corridor should actually be.

The Streetcar Solution

Since “heavy rail” corridors are incompatible with casual at-grade crossing, why not accommodate this crossing by converting the First Mile corridor into “light rail” – that is, a streetcar line? Unlike a conventional rail line, a streetcar is perfectly compatible with the urban milieu – more in keeping with the much-needed spirit of a “people place.”

In his “Williamsburg” vision, John Ott proposed incorporating the Baltimore Streetcar Museum into the B&O Museum – and that could be accomplished by relocating the streetcar museum to one of the historic Washington Boulevard streetcar barns.

The historic “First Mile” looking east to the B&O Museum. Carroll Park is immediately to the right (south) and the Mount Clare community to the left (north). (Photo by Brian Babcock)

A “First Mile” tourist streetcar line would conveniently connect the two parts of the combined railroad/streetcar museum and maintain the historical profile of the corridor. In the future, th e line could seamlessly connect to a modern streetcar network linking to the Inner Harbor and other parts of the city.

There are many solutions for this border vacuum, but in its current state it’s a corrosive barrier that discourages all the great things city living should be about, thus reinforcing the unfortunate myth that city life begins and ends at the waterfront.

View the Slide Show by Marc Szarkowski ::::   (pull down on scroll bar to the right)

  Article first published in Baltimore Brew, February 18, 2014

Marc Szarkowski creates plans, models, and illustrations of urban design, planning, and architecture proposals, and is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture. Gerald Neily, who writes for Baltimore Brew, was transportation planner for the city Department of Planning from 1977 to 1996.