by GERALD NEILY
A concrete canyon containing the infamous “Highway to Nowhere” is all that is left of a failed plan to extend I-70 through Baltimore. Now, the MTA is poised to run a rail transit line, the Red Line, right through that canyon, the weirdly-widened section of Franklin and Mulberry Streets that obliterated whole neighborhoods in west Baltimore in the 1970s.
But what if the Red Line project, instead of just being built in the middle of this old wound, could actually heal it and knit these impoverished communities back together? BaltiMorphosis.com, a new website powered with Google Sketchpad and blue-sky thinking, shows how it could be done and asks Baltimoreans to join in the planning process.
Created by web designer and CAD specialist Peter Tocco, BaltiMorphosis aims to promote planning from the grassroots up, rather than from the top down. It gives users the online tools they need to design their own fixes — to envision their own plans for redevelopment, as professional-looking and topographically accurate as those fancy renderings that planners and architects use for their sell-jobs.
The Columbia-based web specialist, who has done graphics for area architects and developers, explained how he came to make the site.
“I wanted to test some new community outreach methods where people can collaborate and put ideas out there and enjoy the pleasure of 3-D modeling,” Tocco said.
Demonstrating what the site can do with the “Highway to Nowhere” was an idea Tocco hatched when he and I met online and corresponded. (I am a former Baltimore city transportation planner who consults and blogs for Baltimore Brew and on my own site, Baltimore InnerSpace).
A powerful tool for the citizen-planner
What Tocco has created (with my design input) is a dazzling superimposed “before and after” depiction of what the Franklin-Mulberry corridor could look like, as well as a 3-D computer model that can serve as a framework for unlimited scenarios of change. Tocco invites the community to submit their own ideas and instructs them in the use of the free version of Sketchup, Google’s 3-D modeling software for amateurs.
Sketchup combines a tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that enables people to make models using real-world coordinates and share them with others.
Tocco said he hopes BaltiMorphosis will be used by the community for all kinds of urban design challenges and that it will appeal to a wide variety of users – from young people with active imaginations to seasoned professionals.
The poster child for planning fiascos
Tocco’s focus on Franklin-Mulberry is an apt and timely one. The failed highway project obliterated several west-side neighborhoods in the 1970s, before grassroots protest killed it off. The chasm left behind is a mile-long expressway fragment that divides neighborhoods that never recovered. This ditch also forms one part of the path laid out for the route of the planned Red Line which is favored by the Maryland Transit Administration and most city officials and civic groups.
But instead of wasting that space, a 40-acre strip that is 6 times wider than it needs to be for its actual traffic volume, very good use can be made of it.
The homepage of BaltiMorphosis.com shows a photo of how Franklin-Mulberry looks now and lets viewers see two overlays: 1) the MTA plan which would sandwich the Red Line into the existing expressway median strip in the same canyon, and 2) an alternate design which would compress the highway up against the south canyon wall so that the rest of the area can be devoted to new people-friendly development, intimately integrated with the new transit line as well as a bike path and other features designed to reconnect the split-up community.
“The Neily Plan,” as Tocco refers to it on the site, had heretofore existed only in words on my blog, BaltimoreInnerSpace.blogspot.com. Tocco brings it to life in 3-D, adding buildings, cars, people, and trees. He illustrates how the existing transit ditch can be gradually sloped, creating a multi-level, multi-modal transit zone in which highway, rail, bikes, pedestrians, and local street traffic can all co-exist harmoniously.
Instead of the Red Line being engulfed in a lifeless highway gulley, it could be designed in a way that energizes the corridor as part of a livable, walk-able environment.
Crowdsourcing a solution
Debate so far in Baltimore over the Red Line, Tocco said, “is focusing on whether or not it goes underground” in the neighborhoods of Edmondson Village and relatively affluent Fells Point and Canton. “But they’re totally overlooking the potential opportunity they have for healing” an economically disadvantaged community that has few public advocates, he said.
Critics will point out that the wesbite doesn’t attempt to put a price tag on this idea for Franklin-Mulberry, but Tocco said BaltiMorphosis is more about inspiration. He said he sees it as the first step in liberating Baltimore’s physical planning process from the shackles of “top down” planning, where projects gain a life of their own from momentum bestowed by the “powers that be” rather than any real logic.
The Franklin-Mulberry corridor is precisely where the MTA has decided to “go cheap” on the Red Line, but it is actually the place where intelligent investment offers the biggest long-term payoff.
Baltimore city officials have so far “not had the imagination to do something this creative,” Tocco said. “Maybe someone from the large pool of talent in this town, especially the younger people, can come up with a solution that takes hold.”
Fern Shen also contributed to this article
