The little ditch in Curtis Bay has a story to tell — of crime and punishment, of death and rebirth, and of one man’s singular journey, just now coming full circle.
The ditch, in a gritty, urban kind of way, is looking up these days. Sycamores, black locusts and other pioneering species sprout from its banks. A hawk hunts the abandoned industrial landscape it drains.
Its waters, trickling toward Baltimore Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay are murky, junky; but the vivid, toxic colors of arsenic, chromate and other chemicals that ate away at Steve McAllister’s clothing are long gone.
The ditch was McAllister’s home for a week 25 years ago, when the Vietnam vet turned environmental activist led a Greenpeace raid on the American Recovery Co.’s waste recycling plant here in Curtis Bay.
Capitalizing on the Constitution’s guarantee of public access to all “navigable waters,” McAllister’s crew muscled an inflatable raft up the barely-tidal ditch, under a heavy fence and into the heart of the waste facility’s operation, cementing the company’s discharge pipe shut.
There, in the “navigable waters” of the little ditch they camped, employees walled them off with barbed wire and threatened them with knives.
Ultimately they were arrested and convicted of trespassing. But the publicity they generated regarding the company’s polluting discharges led to a spate of lawsuits and efforts by the state to revoke American Recovery’s license to operate.
A little more than a year after Greenpeace’s initial 1983 assault, the company permanently closed.
During the next several years, thousands of residents will be moving into new neighborhoods arising on the reclaimed slopes of northern Anne Arundel County, overlooking Curtis Bay, the broad Patapsco River, and the little ditch, unmindful of how it all began there.
If they know McAllister at all, it will be as the wealthy, southern Maryland-based developer who has spent years piecing together and cleaning up old city landfill property, and former toxic waste dumpers’ nighttime spots here.
At around 300 acres and 1,600 units (condos, townhomes, single family and retail stores), his Glen Abbey community will be one of Maryland’s largest conversions of abandoned, industrial “brownfields” to residential development.
Bordered by or near to the Ritchie Highway, the Baltimore Beltway, I-97, Route 10 and BWI Airport, “it’s a transportation winner,” McAllister says.
The surrounding blue-collar communities have been in decline, so schools and streets, unlike so much of Anne Arundel, are actually underutilized.
It seems the essence of “Smart Growth,” a national trend begun by Maryland to encourage development where roads, sewage and other infrastructure exist, rather than sprawling across rural open spaces.
“Actually, I’d have liked to get more innovative, put ten thousand people here,” McAllister says; but the county wasn’t interested.
He does give Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s administration major credit for making the state Brownfields redevelopment program work well. The program protects developers from future toxics liability once they meet state and federal cleanup standards.
Following Baltimore Harbor campaigns in 1983 and 1984, McAllister rose to become a top official in Greenpeace. He left after a power struggle over responding to the resumption of U.S. underground nuclear testing–Greenpeace decided to take a protest ad in the New York Times; McAllister wanted to parachute activists into ground zero.
In 1986 he borrowed a friend’s car, bought a used suit, and convinced a bank to finance his first small development in Prince Georges County.
Recently he’s had as many as 23 projects going, including a big, new office building at BWI. Glen Abbey, he says, is his last hurrah as a developer.
“This is the fun one,” he says, after years of standard-issue subdivisions. “It appeals to my quirky brain.”
He always wanted to include the actual American Recovery site in his plans. But though abandoned for years, the city still considers it prime industrial waterfront.
Indeed, harbor industries were Glen Abbey’s main opponents, fearing that McAllister’s 1,000-foot buffer of undeveloped land between Glen Abbey and them won’t stop complaints of noise, odors and air pollution.
At 58, the old ditch-sitter turned developer looks as lean and active, if somewhat balder, as the day he sailed into Baltimore in his mid-30s.
He’ll most likely resume environmental activism, perhaps a bit more respectably than earlier on, he says. In recent years he’s lent his 72-foot, Mediterranean-based yacht, Ranger, to a group working to enforce fishing regulations there.
