This is how the president of the Maryland Institute College of Art describes the idea behind their new MICA PLACE program in East Baltimore:

To “immerse… students in the community, listen and learn from the community, and then create projects that make life measurably better for the citizens that live there,” as Fred Lazarus IV described it to The Baltimore Sun In July.

But actually, there isn’t much community left for those wide-eyed, fresh-faced art students to interact with – only vacant boarded-up houses. Starting this month, 26 art students will be living in a newly-renovated building immersed in a community that mostly does not yet exist.

The new MICA PLACE facility where the students will live is a half-block away from the desolate Collington Avenue scene shown above, in a photo taken on a typical weekday afternoon looking northward from Ashland Avenue to the Amtrak overpass.

Parking is not prohibited – there just isn’t any. The only signs of life are in things like the satellite TV dishes, which still adorn a few window frames. Similar scenes exist throughout the adjacent neighborhood north of Madison Street, south of the Amtrak tracks, west of Patterson Park Avenue and east of the currently active East Baltimore Development Inc. redevelopment area, which starts at Washington Street.

East Baltimore Development Inc. is, in fact, the landlord and partner of the new MICA PLACE facility.

EBDI’s massive demolition and redevelopment effort north of Hopkins Hospital has now reached a transition of sorts. In an area that was virtually a wasteland, after residents were moved out a few years ago and rowhouses were leveled to the ground, there are now more people living in brand-new housing near the new Hopkins Biotech Park than there are in the comparably-sized area just to the east where MICA PLACE will be — a lot more.

In the area east of the massive demolition area, MICA PLACE signals EBDI’s engagement in a different strategy. Instead of starting over by tearing everything down, they are starting over by inviting students to be urban pioneers in the re-population of the now-mostly-empty territory. The program will be limited to graduate students, who should already know a few things about the real world, if not about urban renewal.

However, the one place in this area which remains well-occupied is the block face right across the street from MICA PLACE. These will be the closest people to welcome their artist neighbors to their new world. Since these locals have been living with the surrounding boarded-up blight for quite a while now, there is no doubt much which they can teach their new neighbors, in addition to what they can learn from their art. This should include mankind’s oldest art form – the art of survival.

A palette-able future?

Just as in Station North, Highlandtown, Howard Street and other communities trying to use art as a tool for urban revitalization, art is just one piece of the puzzle. There is also the chess game of displacement, which has already played out here before the students arrive, as evidenced by the empty houses. In the same way, neatly-maintained rows of new but vacant houses in places like Otterbein and Barre Circle stood ready for future occupants.

There are limits to the canvas being filled in by the city’s social engineers. Several years ago, Housing activist Ed Rutkowski and now-City Councilman Bill Henry led a community-based effort to figure out what to do with Orleans Street, four blocks south of MICA PLACE. They realized that Orleans Street has very obviously been a strong impediment to the northward march of waterfront revitalization which Rutkowski’s Patterson Park Community Development Corporation used to jump-start the community just to the south.

Orleans Street is no wider than any other street in the area, yet it carries the extremely heavy US 40 traffic across town. Only a narrow sidewalk separates the raging traffic street from the houses, without even any room for parking. It is no wonder that the wave of Patterson Park revitalization has stopped in its tracks at this point.

The Patterson Park CDC was a casualty of the recent housing crisis, but the issues live on. The City declined to incorporate Orleans Street in its comprehensive southeast transportation study completed in 2008, but is now rebuilding the wide portion of the street adjacent to Hopkins west of Wolfe Street, so the traffic plague will remain and probably get even worse. So it is smart that EBDI has used recession-resistant Hopkins to the west, rather than Patterson Park to the south, as its initial catalyst.

Then there is the Monument Street commercial area just north of Orleans, which has had its own revitalization initiatives over the years. But experience throughout Baltimore has been that residential areas fuel commercial districts, rather than vice-versa, even where there are huge, nearby employment centers like Hopkins.

Sketching in some transit

Another excellent possibility for this area is rail transit. The MTA has all but given up on the idea of extending the Metro northward from Hopkins Hospital toward Morgan State University and eventually to White Marsh. A decade ago, this project was placed at the same high priority level as the Red Line, but the MTA has quietly realized after intensive study that there are no good ways to extend the line northward because the tunneling would be far too expensive.

So unless the MTA and Hopkins are resigned to simply let the Metro end at Hopkins for many more decades, where it is incapable of serving the crucial role as a feeder bus terminal, they must seriously examine the only feasible option – extending the Metro eastward, above ground along the Amtrak tracks where many strong possibilities exist, as proposed by the Transit Riders Action Council (and by me).

A Metro station could be located near the Amtrak overpass shown in the first photo. The students from MICA PLACE could then quickly take the Metro directly over to the MICA campus near the existing State Center Station – a travel time of about nine minutes. (Of course, 26 art students do not warrant a major rail project, but they are an example of the synergies that would be created by linking areas of Baltimore which are not now linked.)

Hopkins also wants two new MARC stations, one each along the Metro and the Red Line, but a single new station linked to a Metro extension along the Amtrak tracks would be far easier to build and would serve the roles of both of them.

View from the Fancy Dining Car

The Greater Baltimore Committee has also gotten into the act, urging the renewal of this area which is now the indelibly sad view of Baltimore that many Amtrak riders remember, including Randy Newman, who wrote a song called “Baltimore” about it.

Ten years ago when the Red and Green Lines were first conceived eastward along the waterfront and northward to Morgan and White Marsh, the area east of Hopkins Hospital was not even on the radar screens. But now it is, in a big way.

MICA PLACE is very clearly an early stroke in what could become a beautiful artistic creation, as Baltimore paints people back into the scene.