Autumn adventures beyond Baltimore City limits took me to areas I assumed were somehow protected and would always remain pristine - shocking me with vista after vista sullied with inappropriate, poorly designed, cheaply constructed, non-contextual, cardboard crap. On those journeys north, I encountered very early to mid-morning unbroken lines of traffic resembling nothing short of a mass evacuation into Baltimore City.
All the newfangled light bulbs, high-tech solar hot water systems, and single-stream recycling can never stamp out the carbon footprint resulting from the plowing under of farm after farm and the aftermath of this ultimate form of anti-green violence.
Developers seek a blank page, but that's also available in the center of Baltimore City - witness more-fabulous-by-the-minute Harbor East; modular housing construction in the Oliver neighborhood; the in-progress restoration of the city's most fanciful Victorian brickpile, the American Brewery; and, of course, EBDI's on-going, staggering transformation within our piano - with an eye to jump the piano in the not-too-distant future.
One developer friend refers to large-scale rehabilitation and build-from-scratch projects as urban farming, and with tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots, there's no shortage of opportunities. The recent challenge of trying to find a reasonably safe walking/biking route between my house in Bolton Hill and my job at EBDI - all of two miles, past some abandoned rows similar to Bolton Hill, save for the dearth of people to love them - made me realize the need to insure we go beyond developing random parcels to farming the ribbons in between so the city can grow more quickly back together.
When - not if - the scarcity of energy pushes and freezes a gallon of gas north of five dollars, commuters fighting their way into the City of Baltimore and armies of developers will recognize that acres of abandonment are the next green pastures.
No comments:
Post a Comment