A BLUE-SKY BALTIMORE BLUEPRINT
By GERALD NEILY

If the City is going to spend a billion dollars to tear down the last mile of the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) and replace it with a boulevard, they had better give us a lot more than just a glorified median strip with vast streams of traffic whooshing (or crawling) by on either side. For anything approaching that kind of money, a JFX makeover should effectively reorganize traffic and seamlessly extend downtown.

One solution? Don’t knock down the big elevated highway, just nudge it over, near the prisons. Read the rest of this entry »

Fort McHenry is on a peninsula, but it might as well be an island. Baltimore’s most important and enduring tourist attraction, the birthplace of our national anthem, is also its most isolated. When befuddled tourists discover they can’t get there by following the Inner Harbor waterfront promenade, many just give up.

 

But extending the promenade to Fort McHenry should be much easier than anyone has imagined. Unlike some of the more out-there proposals for spiffing up the city (gondolas over the Inner Harbor, knocking down the Jones Falls Expressway, turning a century-old derelict railroad bridge into the centerpiece of walking trail to a developer’s upscale develoment) this promenade idea would face few political or physical impediments, isn’t horribly expensive and could actually happen quickly. 

It should be planned now, in fact, to complement the new $14 million visitors center which recently began construction.

A glitzy Harbor East-type makeover is apparently the driving vision behind studying the feasibility of razing the Jones Falls Expressway, a $60,000 inquiry launched by Mayor Sheila Dixon and reported in The Baltimore Sun over the weekend. The idea is to redevelop the swath of land between the highway and the Johns Hokins medical campus.

But even if the ugly elevated highway were erased from the landscape, could a design laid out for affluent urbanites really weave in some of the area’s more challenging features: including a prison and other assorted razor-wire topped correctional facilities? Read the rest of this entry »