“Hip, cool neighborhoods” are here today because a highway was not built yesterday
Had the highway planners succeeded not so long ago, we would not have Fells Point and Federal Hill as we know these neighborhoods today, as this 1959 drawing shows. Courtesy of the Baltimore City Commission on Historic and Architectural Preservation
About 50 years ago, highway planners were hard at work on a vision to build I-95 along Baltimore’s waterfront. Dirty, gritty and forlorn, a place for the down and out, the area that was to become the hip, cool neighborhoods we know today as Fells Point and Federal Hill was not much thought about when the highway extension was proposed. Few pondered the negative aspects of wiping out existing communities for something so progressive as an expressway, not to mention the unhappy result that bridging the basin would have meant for the USS Constellation’s permanent berth which would have been cut off from the water by an elevated highway. Quite likely, Canton and Harbor East never would have become the sought-after neighborhoods they are today.
The highway was ultimately defeated, spawning a career for a plucky senator named [Barbara] Mikulski, and a famous mayor and later governor named [William Donald] Schaefer who spearheaded the glitzy development and promenade that made the Inner Harbor the default destination for all of Baltimore to bring out of town guests.
Fast forward to July 13, 2013 when the Baltimore City YA (BCYA) and Magothy River SA (MRSA) Race to Baltimore crosses the mark at Tide Point. Participants will head to Fells Point for the after-race party. They might get there via water taxi, and you can too. They run year round, but more often on summer weekends, crisscrossing the harbor from the basin to Canton to Fort McHenry as well as the short ride between Fells Point and Locust Point. For seven bucks a seat and $12 for an all-day pass, they’re the best cruise deal in town and a great way to cap off a race.
The basin, popularly called the Inner Harbor, is where all manner of traffic comes together. Local sailing school graduates come away with a keen appreciation for the rules of the road and how to get out of a jam in tight quarters. Throughout the harbor, planners today are working to balance the needs of the harbor for tourists, sailors, powerboaters and kayakers, while recognizing the primacy of its purpose as a working seaport.
At the same time, the brand new neighborhood of Harbor East is gaining momentum. Occupying what was a warren of warehouses and other obsolete uses between Fells Point and the Inner Harbor, new businesses, restaurants, hotels, clubs and residences are springing up like mushrooms.
There might have been cruise ships nosing right into Canton if a plan envisioned for Canton Crossing had panned out. About 100 cruises a year depart from the Locust Point Terminal, which has better highway access now that I-95 is where it is. You see them barreling down the Bay bound for Bermuda or the Bahamas, but you wonder whether the water taxi might be closer to the real thing as the sun sets on another fun night in Baltimore Harbor.
Thames Street in Fells Point
The best place of all for sailors seeking the authentic, in my mind, is Fells Point. Beyond the bars and the boutiques are vestiges of nearly three centuries of working waterfront. Ships were built here, and seamen and shipwrights lived and worked here, too. Frederick Douglass learned to read here, and later built a row of houses that still stand today. Had the highway planners succeeded not so long ago, much if not all of Baltimore’s great maritime legacy would have been lost forever.
Related articles
- More Waterfront Attractions Could Come To Baltimore City (baltimore.cbslocal.com)
- Groups study upgrades for Baltimore waterfront (wbaltv.com)
- Billion Dollar Development Would Close Gap Between Fells Point & Harbor East (baltimore.cbslocal.com)
- Fells Point on of the American Planning Association’s 2012 list of Greatest Places in America: Neighborhoods (planning.org)
Jul 12, 2013 @ 15:43:57
Many of the first ships commissioned by the US Navy were built in Fell’s Point shipyards, including the USS Constellation in 1797. Today most would agree that to have lost this legacy and the USS Constellation, which is now located in the Inner Harbor, to a highway would have been an irreparable travesty. Baltimore certainly would not have experienced several decades of downtown revival had this and other highways been built.
Questions remain though, why were federal and state highway planners permitted to plan and design a highway through Baltimore’s harbor in the first place? Who had oversight over these decisions? Also, why was there only limited public input into the highway planning process necessitating intervention by the courts?
While not perfect today, the transportation planning profession grew a great deal as a result of these and other egregious mistakes that were made by highway planners five decades ago.
Jul 15, 2013 @ 12:21:02
Excellent article and fascinating picture of the possibly-ruined basin Steve.
To me, after the failed highway “progressive renewal,” it is amusing to find Fells within the list of APA’s “Great Places in America” 2012: http://www.planning.org/greatplaces/neighborhoods/2012/
Jul 22, 2013 @ 16:32:42
We have indeed come a long way as a profession.
Planning in the days of yore was more autocratic, and highways were thought to be the wave of the future. Routing them in the path of least resistance was common, along streams (the JFX), through neighborhoods that lacked political clout (the highway to nowhere, aka I-70 N) or in places nobody cared about (the inner harbor). It was just the way things were done at the time.