Franklin-Mulbery streets remade, with massive mayoral mug shot. (click to enlarge.)
As long as they’re re-imagining Baltimore’s most infamous concrete canyon – that ‘roided-up stretch of Franklin and Mulberry streets that was supposed to be an interstate highway – the folks at BaltiMorphosis have decided to go all-out.
Yesterday, they added a murals page, where you can submit your proposal for a mural that could be painted alongside the famed “Highway to Nowhere.” They provide a few ideas : a National Aquarium-themed version heavy on the clownfish motif, a graffiti design that seems a little, well, defeatist. Our favorite is the one above, with the head shots of city officials, including a “Dear Leader”-sized portrait of Mayor Sheila Dixon.
They’re all about blue-sky-ing at BaltiMorphosis, the brainchild of Columbia-based graphics expert Peter Tocco and the Brew’s Gerald Neily. The website brings to life Neily’s idea for how to re-integrate the Franklin-Mulberry/Route 40 “ditch,” as he calls it, into the west Baltimore communities it tore apart back in the 1970s. Arming site users with Google Sketchpad, a user-friendly 3-D imaging tool, BaltiMorphosis invites people to submit their own design ideas.
While the BaltiMorphosis ideas are all part of an exercise, artist Ashley Milburn is working on rallying the community to come up with art for Franklin-Mulberry that will actually be made. In 2007, Milburn got a grant for the project from the Open Society Institute.
The way he conceives of the job, it’s even bigger than filling up the 3.5 mile-long wall along the roadway. He’s looking at the community split apart by the road project (which displaced thousands of residents and destroyed hundreds of homes) and hoping the mural can reunite it.
