July 10, 2013
Steven Allan, AICP
History, Land Use, Smart Growth
barbara mikulski, Fell's Point Baltimore, highway planners, Inner Harbor, Inner Harbor East Baltimore, locust point, sustainable communities, tide point, transportation, uss constellation, William Donald Schaefer
“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.
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September 7, 2012
David T. Whitaker, AICP
Historic Preservation
Antietam, Battle of South Mountain, Manassas, Maryland Campaign of 1862, William Donald Schaefer
Lincoln at Antietam
In the fall of 1988, a national debate ensued over the approval of a 1.2-million square foot shopping mall on the historic Civil War battlefield north of Manassas. Nationwide concern for the integrity of the Manassas National Battlefield Park was aroused when the Hazel/Peterson Companies obtained approval and began to build the regional shopping mall on this site. In response, the U.S. Congress employed a rarely used procedure called a “legislative taking” to acquire the contested mall site at a cost of $134 million to buy the 550 acres of land from the Virginia development firm. The Manassas Mall controversy is currently taught as a “planning failure” in many planning curriculums. In Virginia, many residents asked, “who would protect ‘hallowed ground’ if local authorities were not inclined to do so?”Fortunately, Maryland elected leaders and state officials took a different approach to Civil War site preservation. That is why tens of thousands of tourists who will visit Antietam and South Mountain over the next couple of weeks will have the opportunity to see and walk ground that remains reasonably true to the original conditions of 150 years ago. More
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April 20, 2011
Andrew Ratner
Planning, Smart Growth
baltimore, harborplace, Inner Harbor, light rail, Maryland, maryland department of planning, Maryland Science Center, smart growth, state center, William Donald Schaefer
Governor William Donald Schaefer advocated for smart growth before we called it that. He passed the 1992 Planning Act, the ’91 Forest Conservation Act and Harborplace speaks for itself. He was known for his outreach to the business community and maybe even thought of himself foremost in terms of economic development, but he was also a strong advocate for environmentalism and the bay. The challenges he faced have not gone away.
We need to grow smarter now more than ever because we are continuing to spread out and leave behind older communities, and most of the communities getting the faster rates of growth tend to be ones that don’t growth as efficiently as the older communities.
— Richard E. Hall, AICP, Maryland Secretary of Planning
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