Business & Developmentby Brew Editors8:22 amSep 2, 20090

Transit line could uplift a struggling Baltimore community

Estelle Kent has high hopes for Baltimore's Red Line.

Estelle Kent has high hopes for Baltimore's Red Line. (

Neighborhood Voices on the Red Line Route:
ESTELLE KENT

If the Red Line means change for her west Baltimore neighborhood — an end to the drug abuse, joblessness and poverty — then bring it on, says Estelle Kent.

This 54-year-old longtime community activist very much favors the Red Line transit project — which would send light rail cars right up the middle of Edmondson Avenue, not far from her house. The Red Line, she’s convinced, will bring development that would boost up her proud-but-challenged community. Kent has seen it steadily deteriorate, she said, since moving there from Calvert County in 1969.

“Today, it’s nothing like it was then,” said Kent, vice president of the Lower Edmondson Village Community Association. “I hope it will become more safe for everyone around here, that it will be pretty. Right now the way it looks around here, I would not want to move here. The consensus in my neighborhood? They want to see change and they think the Red Line could bring it.”

Vacant house on Edmondson Ave. Could the Red Line improve the neighborhood? (Photo by Fern Shen for Baltimore Brew)

Vacant house on Edmondson Ave. Could the Red Line improve this neighborhood? (

A former state employee who worked as an administrator at the Rosewood Center, Kent said she attended numerous meetings with city and MTA officials and believes them when they say no property will be seized, in spite of widespread local belief to the contrary.

If Kent is friendly toward the idea of mass transit, it could be because she has fond memories of seeing streetcars when she visited her Baltimore relatives as a child: “I remember people holding onto them wearing roller skates and hanging on for a ride.” Young people and senior citizens in her area do use mass transit these days, she said. And even though she has a car, she occasionally uses it too.

“Every now and then I’ll go to Mondawmin and take the subway to downtown, to go to jury duty” or on an errand at a city government office, she said. “The subway saves you the driving and the parking cost and the gas money. With the light rail, if it came here, I wouldn’t even have to drive to take it.”

The swimming pool at the Clipper Mill complex, one stop on Baltimore's light rail. (Photo by Fern Shen.)

The swimming pool at the Clipper Mill complex, one stop on Baltimore's light rail. (

Just for fun, she said, she has taken her kids on the city’s existing north-south light rail line, riding it up to Hunt Valley.

“We went to that supermarket on Shawan Road (Wegman’s) and we went to that place Clipper Mill and it was amazing: this swimming pool, it was like something you would have in Rome,” she said. “It made me realize some of the things you miss, driving, that you get to see when you take mass transit. I wouldn’t have known about that place if we didn’t have light rail.”

– by FERN SHEN

Fern Shen is the editor/publisher of Baltimore Brew.

(Tomorrow: more neighborhood voices on the Red Line, pro and con, east-side and west-side.)

BREWED RECENTLY ON THE RED LINE . . . .
today:
“Transit Line a Burden, not a boon, for thriving, car-centric Canton”

previously:
“Time for Some Myth-busting on Baltimore’s Red Line, Says a Believer”

“Baltimore’s Red Line? Better for Developers Than Transit Riders.”

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