A memorial tree for Stephen Pitcairn on the 2600 block of St. Paul

Photo by: Gerald Neily

When he was murdered in South Charles Village last Sunday, Stephen Pitcairn was doing exactly what city planners strive for people to do – contributing to the vitality of the city’s neighborhoods by walking. Pitcairn was even utilizing the planners’ chosen strategy. He was walking from Penn Station, where planners have been encouraging transit-oriented development for many decades to generate street life.

Just this past Wednesday, Governor O’Malley and the state Board of Public Works approved the first phase of what is promised to eventually be a $1.4 billion dollar redevelopment project to similarly add vitality to the nearby State Center area, which has been home to both a heavy and a light rail station for several decades. In spite of being a transportation hub, this area is nevertheless desolate in the evening due to a lack of activity-generating development.

Transit station areas have been given special attention from planners to promote vitality. But everyone makes their own decisions as to whether a given area will become active, and the planners’ success or failure is determined by our collective activities.

No two people see the city exactly the same way

Virtually everyone who navigates the city has his or her own mental map, even planners. Especially planners. This is particularly unavoidable when we use transit as a principal tool in revitalization – you go where you allow the transit system to take you. For example, the city made a conscious decision to make Penn Station the northern terminus of its Charm City Circulator. Many people would have loved for it to have gone farther north, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

Each of our mental maps is essentially divided into areas we deem “vital” and what is “terra incognita”, a sixteenth century Latin term which simply means “land unknown” (applied to Baltimore in a March 2007 Urbanite article). Activity breeds familiarity, which breeds comfort and “terra incognita” is anything but.

After years of limited success at attracting new activity, the Station North community surrounding Penn Station has finally achieved significant progress by recently branding itself as an arts district, and subtly changing its physical focus to more of an east-west orientation than to its traditional position in the north-south spine between downtown and Charles Village.

City Arts Apartments in Station North (Photo by Gerald Neily)

Station North’s new east-west orientation is anchored on the west by the Maryland Institute College of Art and upper class Bolton Hill, and to the east by new “artists’ housing” next to the walled-in Green Mount Cemetery, an area that until now was in almost everybody’s “terra incognita.”

Strong boundaries make strong mental maps

Green Mount Cemetery actually provides a solidly impenetrable “blight blockade” for the new artists housing on the east edge of Station North, where the boundaries of the activity on our mental maps can be safely rooted in physical reality.

In contrast, the area between Station North and Charles Village, where Stephen Pitcairn was murdered, has very few clear borders that would allow vitality to be focused. Its mental maps are much more ambiguous. The block of the murder is actually gorgeous, but it fades gradually away into creeping blight from block to block.

Baltimore is full of these ambiguities. Lafayette Square is another nearby neighborhood of magnificent Victorian townhouse mansions that suffers because it is not contained, allowing it to get lost in our mental maps.

The oldest revitalization success story in this area is Bolton Hill, where a moat of destruction was wrought in the 1960s to contain and thus define the identity of this upper class neighborhood. Virtually everything surrounding the neighborhood was demolished and fumigated, architectural treasures and trash alike, in the then-new State Center complex to the south, along the Jones

Falls Expressway and Mount Royal Avenue to the east, North Avenue to the north and Linden Avenue to the west. This worked extremely well for Bolton Hill, but not without serious collateral damage. Just outside these borders, the architecturally supreme Reservoir Hill and Eutaw Place are still trying to recover. And the State Center complex to the south is still a dead zone being groomed for that $1.4 billion revitalization.

Mental maps or “Plans Sans Frontieres”?

Are mental maps a good thing or not? One could argue that they are among the only effective planning tools we have. Unfocused revitalization has hardly ever worked in Baltimore. The area north of Hopkins Hospital is perhaps the most vivid example of a neighborhood that failed so much to pull itself up by its bootstraps that it was finally totally leveled to the ground to start over. The planners also astutely made the Amtrak tracks the northern boundary, in order to unambiguously contain the revitalization. On the other hand, this does not bode well for the area on the other side of the tracks, including the magnificent and heroically renovated American Brewery building.

Demolition behind Johns Hopkins (Photo courtesy of Baltimore Business Journal)

The proposed $1.8 billion Red Line transit project has a very mixed role in the divide and conquer of urban renovation. On the east side, the Red Line is proposed to stay very close to the waterfront where revitalization has already happened, and where the water itself is the ultimate boundary of containment. So the transit line is assured of avoiding “terra incognita,” even if it means that it will not be much of a catalyst and almost half of its service corridor will be literally all wet.

On the west side of the Red Line, the West MARC station has received most of the attention. This appears to be a prescription for disaster, to use Penn Station’s decades of futility as a cautionary guide. There is practically no border of physical containment. Moreover, the city intends to preserve the cancerous highway to nowhere which destroyed the community in the first place, sticking the Red Line in the median, cheek-by-jowl with the whizzing traffic there and as the highway dumps into Franklin and Mulberry Streets.

There are alternatives that would create a meaningful focus to which redevelopment could be anchored, such as the Baltimophosis.com plan which would isolate and narrow the highway, but the city is uninterested.

Transit stations are only one of many enablers for this mode of geographic revitalization. Baltimore has used many other catalysts, particularly institutions, museums, stadiums, hotels and the like.

The earliest antecedent for mental maps were the all-too-real maps stating where blacks and Jews could live. There is the web of insurance rate and mortgage zones. Then there are school-zone boundaries, which recently caused a major fight in Rodgers Forge, just over the City Line.

But perhaps the overarching theme is tax policy. Baltimore’s property taxes are so prohibitively high that the primary focus of economic development efforts has necessarily been to nullify this factor as much as possible for the chosen developers. Tax-exempt non-profit institutions have also flourished. Tax policy has thus been played a major role in the selective manner in which Baltimore has been revitalized. Some people pay taxes and some don’t.

In an ideal Baltimore, we would have “plans without borders.”  The city would have low crime, low taxes, great schools, great transit and active streets full of happy people.  Instead we have mental maps, which we all carry to guide us around the city.