by GERALD NEILY

Along with drafting ambitious, unconventional yet realistic plans for a better-functioning Baltimore, my so-called “Blue Sky Blueprints,” I like to encourage bold urban design initiatives wherever I see them. So now, for embracing just such a blue-sky idea, I’m awarding the first “Bluey” to the Southeast Community Development Corporation and the Greektown Community Development Corporation.

Instead of tinkering at the margins of change, defined and constrained by the bureaucratic establishment, the Southeast and Greektown CDCs have mobilized Highlandtown to prepare for a totally new Highlandtown Loft District – a new kind of community of over 3,500 residences in a formerly industrial area that now has practically nothing. The anchor would be the hulking Crown Cork and Seal Building, which would be transformed into a great loft complex. A stop on the proposed Red Line would connect the new neighborhood to the rest of town.

Where the City and the MTA have gotten mired in a long and tedious process of hammering the “square pegs” of a 1960s-era east-west transit plans into the “round holes” of 21st century realities, these groups have taken a clean sheet of paper, blue-sky thinking and developed a new, more relevant plan where everything fits together. Read the rest of this entry »

rA BLUE-SKY BLUEPRINT FOR BALTIMORE
By GERALD NEILY

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