Huge swaths of the city need to be rejuvenated. Let's put the same energy and focus to work on redeveloping these areas as is being devoted to Under Armour's Port Covington. Huge open-ended areas of West Baltimore can be redeveloped for the common masses using the same guiding principles as upscale Port Covington. This would also apply to West Baltimore's so-far failed mega-projects - State Center and La Cite - and the impending failure to redevelop the vacant Metro West former Social Security Administration site. The notion that Port Covington is a single once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is simply wrong - designed to divert attention away from other parts of the city.
Here's the basic remedy: Just as in Port Covington, all of Baltimore needs to plan comprehensively for big areas, with particular attention to borders and edges, and with amenities that add overall value.
New Baltimore development has gravitated to the waterfront, not just because people like water, even Baltimore's slimy semi-liquid stuff, but because it's a long continuous and mostly unconflicted open space that can thus make a great promenade. It's also an urban edge, which either becomes a magnet for activity or it becomes a desolate "border vacuum".
The Port Covington plan also calls for huge high-rise buildings next to Interstate 95, which is another urban edge that's not so attractive. But such intense development adjacent to I-95, properly designed, would frame the entire site and prevent the expressway catacombs from being a border vacuum. The plan anticipates that Port Covington as a whole will be desirable enough to add value and thus support such intense development. Hopefully, they're right.
But to the maximum possible extent, development should be driven by overall geographic value and not by subsidies. It's sheer madness the way the Baltimore gives huge decades-long subsidies to its very best locations. If the prime areas get massive subsidies, how can the rest of the city compete?
Port Covington should indeed be expensive and exclusive, although open to all joggers, bicyclists, gawkers and other visitors. Meanwhile, the working class masses should have their own "economy" version of Port Covington.
A great "downscale" version of Port Covington in West Baltimore could be created from the new development associated with my proposal for a six-mile greenway loop. It meets the criteria: It's big. It's continuous. It creates amenities. And it deals with urban edges and fixes border vacuums.
Most importantly, the plan is physically big - big enough to hang all the neighborhoods and all the smaller plans onto it. The actual development projects should be much smaller, unlike the prevailing mega-project mentality where the city is supposed to fire one multi-billion dollar rocket and then stand back for the development explosion.
Development for the "masses" covers a lot of housing markets, from the "bourgeois bohemians" to the wannabe upscale "creative class" to the normal middle and working classes, to the subsidized poor. There needs to be room for everyone here and lots of room for growth without gentriphobia. Planners' social engineering skills can be given a workout in blending in so-called "affordable" housing.
Until now, most West Baltimore planning has focused on very finite development sites at various locations like Sandtown, State Center, Heritage Crossing and the University of Maryland Bio-Park, Some others have languished like La Cite, State Center and the former Social Security Metro West complex.
But the West Baltimore Greenway Loop would be entirely open-ended, even while it is highly defined. It would consist of a very large number of development sites that would be drawn together by a unified planning and marketing effort, but what gets built first should be driven by the market.
Existing "anchor institutions" need to play a role, the foremost being the University of Maryland which straddles MLK Boulevard. All of the new development needs to accommodate physical and thematic connections to their campus.
In the southern portion of West Baltimore, the Pigtown business district needs to serve a vital role. Pigtown is finally poised to take off, after years and even decades of promise. Pigtown needs a greater association with the University campus along MLK Boulevard, the adjacent fully renovated Barre Circle and Ridgely's Delight neighborhoods, and the B&O Railroad Museum/Mount Clare corridor.
The B&O Railroad Museum and Mount Clare mansion in Carroll Park are the area's world class cultural institutions, which need to play a vital role. The Southwest Partnership plan to build walls between the park, the museum corridor and the Mount Clare neighborhood needs to be scrapped. What were they thinking?
All of his might mean less attention than before on the interior areas of West Baltimore, like Union and Franklin Square, Hollins Market and the West Baltimore Street corridor. Improvements in these areas would certainly be welcome, but they would not promote large-scale change like the outer border areas would. It would be like Port Covington concentrating its attention on some land-locked interior site like the Sun printing plant instead of on the waterfront.
The same can be said for areas that are in the interior of outer areas, like Upton, Lafayette Square, Harlem Park and Sandtown to the north, and outer Pigtown to the south. These areas probably need more "topsoil" than has been forthcoming, from which to grow redevelopment. Sandtown is an illustration of this. The $100 million-plus that has already been spent has not led to better conditions for the economic market. Upton may be the notable exception, since it has a strong historical theme and nearby Bolton and Reservoir Hills and Madison Park on its side. There really is no geographic limitation to the spin-off from such an extensive broad-based renewal effort.
So here is a possible sequential ranking of West Baltimore development sites, focused on the proposed six-mile greenway loop:
1 - Heritage Crossing expansion to the south - Fremont Ave. reconnection.
2 - Metro West (former Social Security) office complex - Pine Street university connection.
3 - Mount Clare, north edge of Carroll Park
4 - Pigtown business district gateway from MLK Boulevard and Barre Circle
5 - Amtrak industrial corridor redevelopment south of Franklin Street
6 - Carroll Park Golf Course reorientation and clubhouse - including Montgomery Park.
7 - MLK Boulevard narrowing for linear university campus park and new development.
8 - B&O Railroad Museum "First Mile" plan
9 - Franklin-Mulberry "highway ditch" redevelopment.
10 - West Baltimore MARC Station redevelopment - with new Amtrak tunnel to Penn Station
The Port Covington hype campaign strikes a populist theme: "We will build it. Together." But regardless of whether their brains and our subsidies really creates such a collaboration, "together" is how all planning should be done. As big as Port Covington is, it is hemmed into a finite space by the Middle Branch waterfront and Interstate 95, so it's not really a great geographic catalyst for larger redevelopment, although its better than Harbor Point and Harbor East.
One argument that's been made is that Port Covington is a place of economic hope for a city that needs it. Other than as a rationale for massive subsidies, it should be the other way around. If the city as a whole was an economically healthy development market, it would help Port Covington.
The bottom line is that we need to reinvent and renew the entire city, not just part of it.
 |
| The vacant Metro West tower looks very attractive and ripe for redevelopment in the background of the Heritage Crossing neighborhood, but the "Highway to Nowhere" is in the way and ruins the linkage. |
Here's the basic remedy: Just as in Port Covington, all of Baltimore needs to plan comprehensively for big areas, with particular attention to borders and edges, and with amenities that add overall value.
New Baltimore development has gravitated to the waterfront, not just because people like water, even Baltimore's slimy semi-liquid stuff, but because it's a long continuous and mostly unconflicted open space that can thus make a great promenade. It's also an urban edge, which either becomes a magnet for activity or it becomes a desolate "border vacuum".
The Port Covington plan also calls for huge high-rise buildings next to Interstate 95, which is another urban edge that's not so attractive. But such intense development adjacent to I-95, properly designed, would frame the entire site and prevent the expressway catacombs from being a border vacuum. The plan anticipates that Port Covington as a whole will be desirable enough to add value and thus support such intense development. Hopefully, they're right.
But to the maximum possible extent, development should be driven by overall geographic value and not by subsidies. It's sheer madness the way the Baltimore gives huge decades-long subsidies to its very best locations. If the prime areas get massive subsidies, how can the rest of the city compete?
Port Covington should indeed be expensive and exclusive, although open to all joggers, bicyclists, gawkers and other visitors. Meanwhile, the working class masses should have their own "economy" version of Port Covington.
Port Covington for the masses
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Proposed six-mile greenway loop - Color coded segments:
Light Blue: "Highway to Nowhere"; Purple: MLK Boulevard Greenway; Orange: Pigtown Gateway;
Blue: Carroll Park/B&O Railroad "First Mile"; Green: Gwynns Falls Greenway; Red: Amtrak industrial corridor
|
A great "downscale" version of Port Covington in West Baltimore could be created from the new development associated with my proposal for a six-mile greenway loop. It meets the criteria: It's big. It's continuous. It creates amenities. And it deals with urban edges and fixes border vacuums.
Most importantly, the plan is physically big - big enough to hang all the neighborhoods and all the smaller plans onto it. The actual development projects should be much smaller, unlike the prevailing mega-project mentality where the city is supposed to fire one multi-billion dollar rocket and then stand back for the development explosion.
Development for the "masses" covers a lot of housing markets, from the "bourgeois bohemians" to the wannabe upscale "creative class" to the normal middle and working classes, to the subsidized poor. There needs to be room for everyone here and lots of room for growth without gentriphobia. Planners' social engineering skills can be given a workout in blending in so-called "affordable" housing.
Until now, most West Baltimore planning has focused on very finite development sites at various locations like Sandtown, State Center, Heritage Crossing and the University of Maryland Bio-Park, Some others have languished like La Cite, State Center and the former Social Security Metro West complex.
But the West Baltimore Greenway Loop would be entirely open-ended, even while it is highly defined. It would consist of a very large number of development sites that would be drawn together by a unified planning and marketing effort, but what gets built first should be driven by the market.
Capital projects
Like Port Covington, there would be some major supporting capital projects involved with this. But the most important one would be both very big, but very easy. The city has already done and undone it several times on various occasions, with no significant problems. It just requires setting up some roadblocks.
Priority Project One: Permanently close the "Highway to Nowhere".
Why the powers-that-be have consistently opposed the permanent closure is hard to figure out. During the protracted Red Line planning process, all kinds of crazy ideas were entertained for creating "transit oriented development" and amenities which would somehow have coexisted with the massive highway. One of the strangest was a small jogging loop along the top rim of the highway around Fulton Avenue that would relate to very little. Quite a bit of planning money went into that one. It's probably still on the books but no one seems to talk about it.
Why the powers-that-be have consistently opposed the permanent closure is hard to figure out. During the protracted Red Line planning process, all kinds of crazy ideas were entertained for creating "transit oriented development" and amenities which would somehow have coexisted with the massive highway. One of the strangest was a small jogging loop along the top rim of the highway around Fulton Avenue that would relate to very little. Quite a bit of planning money went into that one. It's probably still on the books but no one seems to talk about it.
Other various projects in a possible priority order could include the following:
2 - B&O Railroad "First Mile" Greenway
3 - Carroll Park Golf Course renewal
4 - Narrowing MLK Boulevard to create a linear park
5 - West light rail Red Line
6 - New replacement West Baltimore MARC commuter rail station
Development Sites
State Center and Poppleton's La Cite are prime examples of mega-projects that have languished for years under convoluted development plans that seem to end up in court more often than not. The lawsuit against State Center was finally thrown out because it wasn't filed in time, but the court took four long years to decide that the plaintiff took too long.
Nothing has happened in the two years since the court ruling either, under either the O'Malley or Hogan governorships. The private developer says they're ready to roll but the ball is still in the state's court.
State Center is served by two rail transit lines but that's apparently not enough. It's adjacent to successful neighborhoods in Bolton Hill, Midtown and Seton Hill, but that's not enough. It's plan includes extending MLK Boulevard into Howard Street, so that it would wrap around the development in a way which would actually isolate it further.
La Cite has similarly languished. It's theme was the wholesale demolition of huge swaths of housing in the middle of the working-class Poppleton neighborhood, which allegedly would create a market for subsidized upscale housing on the cleared blocks because of its proximity to the University of Maryland Bio-Park. Over a decade later, we're still waiting.
But none of this is enough. Only a big trigger like permanently closing the "Highway to Nowhere" would be enough to really get West Baltimore moving.
Once the "Highway to Nowhere" is permanently closed, perhaps the first development project that would become viable would be the extension of the Heritage Crossing neighborhood to the south, combined with the reconnection of Fremont Avenue through the expressway ditch between Franklin and Mulberry Streets. This was actually considered back in the 1990s by Mayor Schmoke's housing commissioner Dan Henson, who is now working for Beatty Development at Harbor Point.
This would set the stage for the urgently needed redevelopment of the vacant 1.1 million square foot Metro West office complex just across MLK Boulevard, owned by the federal government, which is the largest and most critical site in West Baltimore.
But none of this is enough. Only a big trigger like permanently closing the "Highway to Nowhere" would be enough to really get West Baltimore moving.
Once the "Highway to Nowhere" is permanently closed, perhaps the first development project that would become viable would be the extension of the Heritage Crossing neighborhood to the south, combined with the reconnection of Fremont Avenue through the expressway ditch between Franklin and Mulberry Streets. This was actually considered back in the 1990s by Mayor Schmoke's housing commissioner Dan Henson, who is now working for Beatty Development at Harbor Point.
This would set the stage for the urgently needed redevelopment of the vacant 1.1 million square foot Metro West office complex just across MLK Boulevard, owned by the federal government, which is the largest and most critical site in West Baltimore.
 |
| Heritage Crossing (background) should be expanded into what is now the dead space of the "Highway to Nowhere", near Fremont Avenue and MLK Boulevard. |
Existing "anchor institutions" need to play a role, the foremost being the University of Maryland which straddles MLK Boulevard. All of the new development needs to accommodate physical and thematic connections to their campus.
In the southern portion of West Baltimore, the Pigtown business district needs to serve a vital role. Pigtown is finally poised to take off, after years and even decades of promise. Pigtown needs a greater association with the University campus along MLK Boulevard, the adjacent fully renovated Barre Circle and Ridgely's Delight neighborhoods, and the B&O Railroad Museum/Mount Clare corridor.
The B&O Railroad Museum and Mount Clare mansion in Carroll Park are the area's world class cultural institutions, which need to play a vital role. The Southwest Partnership plan to build walls between the park, the museum corridor and the Mount Clare neighborhood needs to be scrapped. What were they thinking?
All of his might mean less attention than before on the interior areas of West Baltimore, like Union and Franklin Square, Hollins Market and the West Baltimore Street corridor. Improvements in these areas would certainly be welcome, but they would not promote large-scale change like the outer border areas would. It would be like Port Covington concentrating its attention on some land-locked interior site like the Sun printing plant instead of on the waterfront.
The same can be said for areas that are in the interior of outer areas, like Upton, Lafayette Square, Harlem Park and Sandtown to the north, and outer Pigtown to the south. These areas probably need more "topsoil" than has been forthcoming, from which to grow redevelopment. Sandtown is an illustration of this. The $100 million-plus that has already been spent has not led to better conditions for the economic market. Upton may be the notable exception, since it has a strong historical theme and nearby Bolton and Reservoir Hills and Madison Park on its side. There really is no geographic limitation to the spin-off from such an extensive broad-based renewal effort.
So here is a possible sequential ranking of West Baltimore development sites, focused on the proposed six-mile greenway loop:
1 - Heritage Crossing expansion to the south - Fremont Ave. reconnection.
2 - Metro West (former Social Security) office complex - Pine Street university connection.
3 - Mount Clare, north edge of Carroll Park
4 - Pigtown business district gateway from MLK Boulevard and Barre Circle
5 - Amtrak industrial corridor redevelopment south of Franklin Street
6 - Carroll Park Golf Course reorientation and clubhouse - including Montgomery Park.
7 - MLK Boulevard narrowing for linear university campus park and new development.
8 - B&O Railroad Museum "First Mile" plan
9 - Franklin-Mulberry "highway ditch" redevelopment.
10 - West Baltimore MARC Station redevelopment - with new Amtrak tunnel to Penn Station
 |
| Redevelopment of the north edge of Carroll Park and B&O "First Mile" from Mount Street, looking south toward the Mount Clare Mansion - as conceived by Marc Szarkowski |
The Port Covington hype campaign strikes a populist theme: "We will build it. Together." But regardless of whether their brains and our subsidies really creates such a collaboration, "together" is how all planning should be done. As big as Port Covington is, it is hemmed into a finite space by the Middle Branch waterfront and Interstate 95, so it's not really a great geographic catalyst for larger redevelopment, although its better than Harbor Point and Harbor East.
One argument that's been made is that Port Covington is a place of economic hope for a city that needs it. Other than as a rationale for massive subsidies, it should be the other way around. If the city as a whole was an economically healthy development market, it would help Port Covington.
The bottom line is that we need to reinvent and renew the entire city, not just part of it.
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