Signs for the future show great potential to build a MARC commuter rail station just inside the city line near the very attractive Violetville neighborhood. Violetville could become the very best railroad suburb in the whole Baltimore-Washington corridor.
Violetville has always been one of Baltimore's quiet strong working-class neighborhoods, which the city economy used to have in abundance but now has only a few. But whether Violetville can continue to resist the negative trends that continue to plague the city is an open question.
The key to making a Violetville Station a special place is to provide no parking - just part of a great neighborhood. Think of Harry Potter's Hogsmeade or Twilight Zone's Willoughby.
The station would be located along Southwest Boulevard, Baltimore's original "Highway to Nowhere" which was supposed to get cars from US 1 through the city until the 1950s when the Harbor Tunnel Thruway was built.
Very recently, the state finally completed a connection to the Beltway from Southwestern Boulevard, reducing it to a single lane in the process, thus finally recognizing that it's not a thruway anymore. Until a few years ago, Southwestern Boulevard looked like a poorly designed freeway, with 50 mph speed limits on some portions despite having uncontrolled crosswalks and pedestrian routes to the Halethorpe MARC rail station and other local destinations.
Crosswalks should not coexist with a 50 mph speed limit. If a motorist was actually to conform to the law, he'd have to slam on the brakes from 50 mph whenever a person was present in a crosswalk. No one did, of course. So Southwest Boulevard was a death trap.
The new improvements finally correct another major design flaw which had required Beltway-bound traffic to filter through Arbutus via local Leeds Avenue. This had also stood since this portion of the Beltway was built in the 1950s.
This long overdue change contrasts with the short city portion of Southwest Boulevard next to Violetville, which still looks like a grossly overdesigned freeway. Since such a design seldom exists in a vacuum, large semi-trailer trucks have spontaneously decided to use it as a parking lot and "rest area". Fortunately, the Oaklee neighborhood just to the west has managed to get this banned from their side of Southwest Boulevard (opposite Violetville and the railroad tracks), and truckers are no longer allowed to leave dis-attached trailers which created a longer term problem. Still, the constant presence of a long line of parked trucks prevents anything attractive from going into the strip of land between Southwest Boulevard and the Amtrak tracks.
But Southwest Boulevard can indeed be easily downsized to serve as a human-scaled front door for a train station and new housing, and create a narrow civilized link between the Violetville and Oaklee neighborhoods on either side of the street. All the traffic in both directions can easily be consolidated on the west (currently southbound) roadway with room left over for drop-offs, eliminating the roadway closest to the station.
Violetville is sufficiently isolated from the truck and highway problems which has served the neighborhood well thus far. However, the neighborhood is far more vulnerable and dependent on the future success or failure of the city as a whole.
Violetville has that in common with its two other smaller closest neighborhoods, Oaklee and Kensington, which are also somewhat isolated, although not to the same extent since they are adjacent to Arbutus in Baltimore County, which has a whole different public sector support system - schools, taxes, services, etc.
In particular, Kensington has extremely attractive single family houses, nestled into a small wedge between Wilkens Avenue, Loudon Park Cemetery, a small part of Yale Heights and the huge, fortress-like Charlestown senior housing complex on the edge of Catonsville.
Can these three neighborhoods continue to seem like lands that time forgot? In a city that has lost a third of its population, where the economy keeps getting more stressed and people continue to get older and move (such as to nearby Charlestown senior complex), this is doubtful. Change is a constant.
Here's a living metaphor: There is currently a huge dead tree hovering over a row of houses on Rock Hill Avenue in Violetville. It was once a beautiful healthy tree that provided shade to the neighborhood, but now it threatens the houses. No one has chopped it down. If a strong wind blows it down, it could severely damage the houses and perhaps the people in them. After such a catastrophe, would the houses be worth enough to get rebuilt, or would they just languish as a cancer for the neighborhood as a whole, as has happened in much of the city?
Of course, I'm not a tree expert and I haven't measured the risk. But this kind of metaphor has played out in many other neighborhoods throughout the city - to bad results. Having insurance is not enough. If the neighborhood is not worth investing in, the wise economic decision for victimized residents would be to simply take your money, move out and live elsewhere, regardless of the insurance check, leaving behind yet another neighborhood that needs help.
All neighborhoods have ups and downs, and it's usually difficult to recognize the tipping point. The nearby Cardinal Gibbons High School closed several years ago and it's not easy to measure that impact. On the other hand, St. Agnes Hospital has continued to grow. Things are seldom static even if they might appear that way.
So let's look at the long range trend. Much of Baltimore, away from Hopkins and the harbor, still does not have a strong identity. Perhaps Violetville, Oaklee and Kensington are economically strong enough to withstand what continues to bring down much of the rest of the city. But maybe not.
At some point, the best course may be to build a MARC rail station along the Amtrak tracks and establish these neighborhoods as viable suburbs for commuters to Washington, DC. This has been tried at the city's other three commuter rail stations, at Penn Station, Camden Yards and West Baltimore, but this is very well where it might work best to take advantage of the fact that Washington continues to boom as a world capital while Baltimore struggles.
In fact, this could become the best transit-oriented community in the entire Baltimore-Washington corridor. Virtually all of the other MARC station communities have competing and conflicting interests that Violetville would not have. Camden Station is downtown, and the CSX Camden line as a whole can't offer good enough service. The Penn Station area did not take off until arts and education supplanted commuting as the primary focus. West Baltimore, Halethorpe and BWI-Marshall are oriented to drive-in riders. The stations closer to Washington don't have enough of an economic advantage over other suburbs.
The isolation of Violetville, Oaklee and Kensington would work to their advantage in creating an environment that can truly work well with suburban transit commuting. The existing residential areas would remain virtually as-is. There would be no big oppressive parking lots or garages and no pressure to build them. New higher density residential development would be located closest to the train station, and specifically tailored to transit commuting, meaning that only a negligible amount of auto traffic would be generated.
A Violetville MARC Station would be laid out in a roughly similar manner to the recently rebuilt Halethorpe Station just over two miles to the south, except without the large parking areas. These would be replaced with new housing oriented the station. Southwestern Boulevard would be narrowed to a single lane in each direction to create more space and a better environment for this development, as well as an easy pedestrian crossing between the neighborhoods. The main entrance to the station would also be from Southwestern Boulevard.
From Violetville, on the other side of the tracks, there should probably also be adjacent new residential development that replaces the industrial complex behind the houses on Haverhill Road. This would include a pedestrian connection over or under the tracks, so that the station is accessible from the rest of Violetville.
The development should also have an orientation to the Violetville Park to create more of a "people presence" for the park and foster its use and maintenance. The park is now hidden from almost the entire neighborhood, which discourages safety and encourages neglect. At present, the softball fields and tennis courts are in very poor condition, and even on a recent beautiful summer Sunday, hardly anyone was there. It would be advantageous to make the maintenance of this park the legal and financial responsibility of the new development.
Surprisingly, there is also a large (nearly five acres) virgin forest area between the railroad tracks and Southwestern Boulevard, interrupted only by the adjacent constant lineup of trucks. An intelligent design for the new development and the station could also incorporate this forest into the Violetville Park, to create an open space for peace and contemplation to augment the current space for more active uses. Of course, economic realities would dictate what could actually be done, but on the other hand, nothing should be done unless it's of high enough quality to be beneficial.
South of this park and an adjacent cemetery and entering Baltimore County, there are other industrial areas that may eventually be redeveloped as well. The vast majority of this is east of the tracks with good direct access to well-used Benson Avenue, and so any changes would be of a lower priority.
The Violetville MARC Station would serve trains on the outer two of the four tracks, which make all the stops between Penn Station and BWI-Marshall Airport, before continuing to New Carrollton and Washington, while the two inner tracks would serve higher speed Acela and Regional Amtrak trains that would not stop here.
In sum, a new MARC station would provide the kind of major future option which is not afforded to most Baltimore neighborhoods, and Violetville could become the nicest station in the whole Baltimore-Washington corridor.
Willoughby and Hogsmeade only exist in our imaginations, but Violetville is real.
Violetville has always been one of Baltimore's quiet strong working-class neighborhoods, which the city economy used to have in abundance but now has only a few. But whether Violetville can continue to resist the negative trends that continue to plague the city is an open question.
The key to making a Violetville Station a special place is to provide no parking - just part of a great neighborhood. Think of Harry Potter's Hogsmeade or Twilight Zone's Willoughby.
 |
| Site of a potential Violetville MARC station, looking south from Wilkens Avenue. A landlocked industrial site is to the left and Southwestern Boulevard is to the right. |
The station would be located along Southwest Boulevard, Baltimore's original "Highway to Nowhere" which was supposed to get cars from US 1 through the city until the 1950s when the Harbor Tunnel Thruway was built.
Fixing Southwestern Boulevard
Very recently, the state finally completed a connection to the Beltway from Southwestern Boulevard, reducing it to a single lane in the process, thus finally recognizing that it's not a thruway anymore. Until a few years ago, Southwestern Boulevard looked like a poorly designed freeway, with 50 mph speed limits on some portions despite having uncontrolled crosswalks and pedestrian routes to the Halethorpe MARC rail station and other local destinations.
Crosswalks should not coexist with a 50 mph speed limit. If a motorist was actually to conform to the law, he'd have to slam on the brakes from 50 mph whenever a person was present in a crosswalk. No one did, of course. So Southwest Boulevard was a death trap.
The new improvements finally correct another major design flaw which had required Beltway-bound traffic to filter through Arbutus via local Leeds Avenue. This had also stood since this portion of the Beltway was built in the 1950s.
This long overdue change contrasts with the short city portion of Southwest Boulevard next to Violetville, which still looks like a grossly overdesigned freeway. Since such a design seldom exists in a vacuum, large semi-trailer trucks have spontaneously decided to use it as a parking lot and "rest area". Fortunately, the Oaklee neighborhood just to the west has managed to get this banned from their side of Southwest Boulevard (opposite Violetville and the railroad tracks), and truckers are no longer allowed to leave dis-attached trailers which created a longer term problem. Still, the constant presence of a long line of parked trucks prevents anything attractive from going into the strip of land between Southwest Boulevard and the Amtrak tracks.
But Southwest Boulevard can indeed be easily downsized to serve as a human-scaled front door for a train station and new housing, and create a narrow civilized link between the Violetville and Oaklee neighborhoods on either side of the street. All the traffic in both directions can easily be consolidated on the west (currently southbound) roadway with room left over for drop-offs, eliminating the roadway closest to the station.
 |
| Southwestern Boulevard looking north in front of impromptu truck parking, behind which is a beautiful virgin forest. All the traffic in both directions could easily be consolidated on the left roadway, with room left over for drop-offs. The proposed Violetville MARC station would be on the right beyond the forest. |
Violetville's fate
Violetville is sufficiently isolated from the truck and highway problems which has served the neighborhood well thus far. However, the neighborhood is far more vulnerable and dependent on the future success or failure of the city as a whole.
Violetville has that in common with its two other smaller closest neighborhoods, Oaklee and Kensington, which are also somewhat isolated, although not to the same extent since they are adjacent to Arbutus in Baltimore County, which has a whole different public sector support system - schools, taxes, services, etc.
In particular, Kensington has extremely attractive single family houses, nestled into a small wedge between Wilkens Avenue, Loudon Park Cemetery, a small part of Yale Heights and the huge, fortress-like Charlestown senior housing complex on the edge of Catonsville.
Can these three neighborhoods continue to seem like lands that time forgot? In a city that has lost a third of its population, where the economy keeps getting more stressed and people continue to get older and move (such as to nearby Charlestown senior complex), this is doubtful. Change is a constant.
 |
| Big dead tree hovering over houses on Rock Hill Avenue in Violetville. |
Here's a living metaphor: There is currently a huge dead tree hovering over a row of houses on Rock Hill Avenue in Violetville. It was once a beautiful healthy tree that provided shade to the neighborhood, but now it threatens the houses. No one has chopped it down. If a strong wind blows it down, it could severely damage the houses and perhaps the people in them. After such a catastrophe, would the houses be worth enough to get rebuilt, or would they just languish as a cancer for the neighborhood as a whole, as has happened in much of the city?
Of course, I'm not a tree expert and I haven't measured the risk. But this kind of metaphor has played out in many other neighborhoods throughout the city - to bad results. Having insurance is not enough. If the neighborhood is not worth investing in, the wise economic decision for victimized residents would be to simply take your money, move out and live elsewhere, regardless of the insurance check, leaving behind yet another neighborhood that needs help.
All neighborhoods have ups and downs, and it's usually difficult to recognize the tipping point. The nearby Cardinal Gibbons High School closed several years ago and it's not easy to measure that impact. On the other hand, St. Agnes Hospital has continued to grow. Things are seldom static even if they might appear that way.
Creating a MARC identity
So let's look at the long range trend. Much of Baltimore, away from Hopkins and the harbor, still does not have a strong identity. Perhaps Violetville, Oaklee and Kensington are economically strong enough to withstand what continues to bring down much of the rest of the city. But maybe not.
At some point, the best course may be to build a MARC rail station along the Amtrak tracks and establish these neighborhoods as viable suburbs for commuters to Washington, DC. This has been tried at the city's other three commuter rail stations, at Penn Station, Camden Yards and West Baltimore, but this is very well where it might work best to take advantage of the fact that Washington continues to boom as a world capital while Baltimore struggles.
In fact, this could become the best transit-oriented community in the entire Baltimore-Washington corridor. Virtually all of the other MARC station communities have competing and conflicting interests that Violetville would not have. Camden Station is downtown, and the CSX Camden line as a whole can't offer good enough service. The Penn Station area did not take off until arts and education supplanted commuting as the primary focus. West Baltimore, Halethorpe and BWI-Marshall are oriented to drive-in riders. The stations closer to Washington don't have enough of an economic advantage over other suburbs.
The isolation of Violetville, Oaklee and Kensington would work to their advantage in creating an environment that can truly work well with suburban transit commuting. The existing residential areas would remain virtually as-is. There would be no big oppressive parking lots or garages and no pressure to build them. New higher density residential development would be located closest to the train station, and specifically tailored to transit commuting, meaning that only a negligible amount of auto traffic would be generated.
 |
| The Kensington neighborhood, one of the city's hidden gems. A building of the huge Charlestown senior living complex can be seen above in the distance. |
Planning a Violetville MARC Station
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| Proposed Violetville MARC Station area shown in orange, straddling Amtrak tracks. The main entrance would be off of a narrowed Southwestern Boulevard (US 1) to the west (left). A neighborhood entrance would be located to the east of the tracks. Adjacent parks would be on each side of the tracks to the south - the existing Violetville Park to the east and a new wooded passive park to the west.. |
From Violetville, on the other side of the tracks, there should probably also be adjacent new residential development that replaces the industrial complex behind the houses on Haverhill Road. This would include a pedestrian connection over or under the tracks, so that the station is accessible from the rest of Violetville.
 |
| Violetville MARC Station site under the power poles, as seen from landlocked commercial operation located behind houses on Haverhill Road. |
The development should also have an orientation to the Violetville Park to create more of a "people presence" for the park and foster its use and maintenance. The park is now hidden from almost the entire neighborhood, which discourages safety and encourages neglect. At present, the softball fields and tennis courts are in very poor condition, and even on a recent beautiful summer Sunday, hardly anyone was there. It would be advantageous to make the maintenance of this park the legal and financial responsibility of the new development.
 |
| Violetville Park looking toward the adjacent railroad tracks under the electric poles. The park's softball fields and tennis courts are not maintained. |
Surprisingly, there is also a large (nearly five acres) virgin forest area between the railroad tracks and Southwestern Boulevard, interrupted only by the adjacent constant lineup of trucks. An intelligent design for the new development and the station could also incorporate this forest into the Violetville Park, to create an open space for peace and contemplation to augment the current space for more active uses. Of course, economic realities would dictate what could actually be done, but on the other hand, nothing should be done unless it's of high enough quality to be beneficial.
South of this park and an adjacent cemetery and entering Baltimore County, there are other industrial areas that may eventually be redeveloped as well. The vast majority of this is east of the tracks with good direct access to well-used Benson Avenue, and so any changes would be of a lower priority.
The Violetville MARC Station would serve trains on the outer two of the four tracks, which make all the stops between Penn Station and BWI-Marshall Airport, before continuing to New Carrollton and Washington, while the two inner tracks would serve higher speed Acela and Regional Amtrak trains that would not stop here.
In sum, a new MARC station would provide the kind of major future option which is not afforded to most Baltimore neighborhoods, and Violetville could become the nicest station in the whole Baltimore-Washington corridor.
Willoughby and Hogsmeade only exist in our imaginations, but Violetville is real.
It looks like a pedestrian bridge linking Joh Ave over the tracks would be a great way to incorporate the wooded area into the Violetville Park and connect Oaklee to Violetville. Although without the narrowing of Southwestern Blvd, Rte 1 is still quite a barrier. I was considering how this could be done in stages and still make an immediate impact.
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