Design a mural for Baltimore's 'Highway to Nowhere'
How a Franklin-Mulberry mural might look, if Charm City had North Korean-style government. (Click to enlarge)
As long as they’re re-imagining Baltimore’s most infamous concrete canyon — that ‘roided-up stretch of Franklin and Mulberry steets that was supposed to become an interstate highway — the folks at BaltiMorphosis.com have decided to go all-out.
Today, they added a murals page, where you can submit your ideas for artwork on the 3.5 mile-long wall that lines the “Highway to Nowhere.”
This planning website for Baltimore (a project of Columbia-based graphics specialist Peter Tocco and Brew contributor Gerald Neily) provides a few ideas to get your juices flowing, including: a National Aquarium-inspired mural with a clownfish and a graffiti-themed design that seems a little, well, defeatist.
Our favorite is the one above, with the mug shots of city officials (including a huge image of Mayor Sheila Dixon that would make the “Dear Leader” proud.)
The Franklin-Mulberry mural idea is entirely virtual, a kind of web-graphics-enabled exercise. (They’re all about blue-skying at BaltiMorphosis. The website’s main exercise is to bring to life Neily’s idea for how to heal this scar on the community and invite others to submit their proposals.)
A real mural, however, is in the works. It’s the dream of artist Ashley Milburn, who has received support for the project from the Open Society Institute Soros.
By the time it was completed in 1979, this dramatic widening of the highway between Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and the west Baltimore MARC station destroyed 700 homes, schools, hospitals and other buildings and displaced an estimated 5,000 residents.
The plan was for the road to connect with Interstate 70, but protest killed the project and it was never completed.