A BLUE-SKY BALTIMORE BLUEPRINT
By GERALD NEILY
By GERALD NEILY
If the City is going to spend a billion dollars to tear down the last mile of the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) and replace it with a boulevard, they had better give us a lot more than just a glorified median strip with vast streams of traffic whooshing (or crawling) by on either side. For anything approaching that kind of money, a JFX makeover should effectively reorganize traffic and seamlessly extend downtown.
One solution? Don’t knock down the big elevated highway, just nudge it over, near the prisons.
The current plan, extending President Street up toward the prison district is not good enough. The JFX already becomes President Street south of Fayette Street toward Harbor East, and it’s a traffic hell that pedestrians invade at their peril. Yes, it created plenty of open space, but the few purposeful people who walk through it go as fast as they can on their way to somewhere else.
The City’s recently-announced plan would tear down the JFX to essentially extend this President Boulevard northward toward to the prison district (in the background of the above photo, but with a much wider median strip meant to resemble parkland sandwiched between the north and south-bound traffic.
Yes, we should have a JFX which avoids walling-off northeast Baltimore and which creates attractive new development parcels in its wake. But the fashion of mixing oppressingly heavy traffic with “livable” open space is a dead end, and also would require close to twice as many lanes to accommodate traffic on surface city intersections than on the existing expressway.
What we need instead is a JFX which distributes traffic where it should go – onto the main arterial street network - and away from the sensitive urban districts which can then be designed around people instead of raging traffic streams.
The solution: Wrap the JFX around the prisons
Instead of knocking down an entire mile of the expressway, the City should bend it eastward just beyond the prison complex for about three blocks, through the parking lots shown in front of the prisons in the photo above. This would wrap the JFX around the south edge of the prisons the same way it already wraps around the west edge between the prisons and Mount Vernon.
The expressway would then terminate near the prisons’ southeast corner near the intersection of Monument and Ensor Street (near Greenmount), where it could connect efficiently to a whole host of major streets that are currently very difficult to get to from the JFX: Monument and Madison Street to get to Hopkins Hospital, Ensor Street to get to Harford Road, and Forrest Street to get to Orleans Street and Central Avenue.
This new JFX “expressway wrap” would help greatly to disperse traffic away from overclogged President Street and the waterfront areas of Harbor East, Fells Point and Canton. It would also give traffic an additional incentive to avoid cutting through Mount Vernon. For many years, the City has strongly resisted efforts by Mount Vernon residents to curtail the use of their community as a dumping ground for JFX traffic.
Big land swap
The most important part of this concept is that the expressway would be realigned to occupy the least desirable vacant land next to the prisons, leaving the most desirable land nearer to downtown available for new development (shown in yellow on the photo above), unfettered by excess expressway traffic.
This could be part of a big land swap. Property owners would give up the land closer to the prisons for the new relocated JFX, and in return, they could be given the land now occupied by the JFX between Guilford Avenue and Fallsway for prime new development.
The JFX would still form a barrier between the prisons and the downtown communities, north of Centre Street, but not between downtown and the new development, south of Centre Street toward downtown and Harbor East, where the expressway would be totally demolished and replaced with surface streets (shown above in green).
North of Centre, the JFX realignment could still be accomplished in a way that pushes the remaining expressway closer to the prisons and away from Guilford Avenue and Mount Vernon. The existing northbound JFX elevated structure closest to the prison could be retained (shown in red in the photo above), but used for southbound traffic. Then the space between there and the prisons could be used for northbound traffic, without an elevated structure, which would allow efficient access from Centre Street and onto Madison Street to be located underneath the old structure. By having southbound traffic above and northbound traffic underneath, they will not conflict with each other.
The half of the existing JFX structure nearest Guilford Avenue would be torn down and flooded with sunlight in a way that creates an attractive buffer between the prisons, the expressway and Mount Vernon.
This photo looking south shows the current situation. The JFX separates the prison on the left from Mount Vernon on the right. The portion of the JFX right next to the prison would stay, and the portion next to the houses would go, along with the on-ramp.
An elevated structure that is only half as wide would no longer seem like a huge urban catacomb, with unsolicited cave dwellers living underneath, who would then be encouraged to seek out a new safer habitat.
The existing JFX is a vestige of a long-ago time when its destiny was seen as connecting to Interstate 95 through East Baltimore. That destiny ended in the 1980s, but somehow, the notion has lingered that it needs to be replaced with a surface boulevard that follows the same path as the dead expressway, toward what is now Harbor East and the redeveloped waterfront. What is really needed is an expressway that disperses traffic to all corners of East Baltimore, without undue stress on any of them.
To view additional Google Earth images, with higher resolution and clickable to full screen format, go to BaltimoreInnerSpace.blogspot.com
