A former Baltimore city planner walks you through the planning boo-boos, segregationist tendencies and “weirdo” neo-dystopian 1970s design sensibilities behind the odd development pattern in the area near the green Roland Park hillside where the Keswick Multi-Care Center has proposed a senior living facility. (You know, the project greeted by Roland Parkers like a spent-fuel rod waste dump?)
His idea for how to create possible alternate sites: punch a connector road from Falls Road (across from the Country Club) to Springarden Drive in Coldspring Newtown. (See photo.) The effect (says Gerald Neily, on his Baltimore InnerSpace blog) would be to extend the Olmsteadian cachet of “Roland Park” over the entire area.
A nursing home, he says, could be built on “one of the many new development opportunities (that) will emerge” if the road is built and the city, say, cleans up and sells its big ugly stump dump. He envisions connecting people to the Cylburn Arboretum, humanizing the harsh Poly-Western campus and relocating the light-rail station (that currently has students “taking their lives in their hands walking across the JFX interchange and down into the gully.”) Could this work? Is Roland Park ready to be woven-in, instead of walled-off?
