Kimberly Canale is proud of the ambitious goals of the Jones Falls Gateway project that she has helped steer as chief of staff for the group that started it, Midtown Baltimore.

The preliminary 79-page Master Plan, completed in September 2022, shows people sauntering past colorful murals on an enhanced Maryland Avenue bridge, planters dripping with begonias on a spiffed-up Lafayette Avenue, and a wide tree-lined path for cyclists and couples on Lanvale Street just before it becomes Falls Road.

Years in the making, the project aims to better connect Baltimore’s Penn Station area to the Jones Falls Trail by making the path paralleling the waterway safer, wider and more inviting and nature-friendly for walkers, runners, bikers and other users.

Nowhere does it show vehicles bringing garbage in to a city waste transfer station. Or trucks hauling large dumpsters full of rubbish out.

“Making it into a drop-off trash and recycling collection location is just asinine to me,” said Canale, speaking with The Brew. “That is the antithesis of what what we were trying to do.”

But that’s just how this area would be used under a plan unveiled last Monday by the Mayor Brandon Scott administration to relocate the city’s Sisson Street trash and recycling transfer facility to 2801 Falls Road, right across from the trail.

“Asinine . . . the antithesis of what the Jones Falls Gateway Project was trying to do”  – Kimberly Canale, former Midtown Baltimore chief of staff.

Falls Road would be permanently blocked off to cars at Mill No. 1 under the proposal. Users would enter and exit the drop-off center from Lafayette Avenue.

Canale, who no longer works for Midtown Baltimore, said there was never a hint from Baltimore’s Department of Transportation (DOT), one of the many public and private partners in the Gateway project, that its focus area could be transformed into an access roads for a trash facility.

Thumbs Down

The proposal has drawn near universal scorn and anger.

Social media pretty much has put Scott – and the developer pushing to buy the Sisson Street property, the Manekin family’s Seawall Development – on blast:

“We’re going to dump our trash right next to a river that regularly floods? Are we trying to keep Mr. Trash Wheel employed?”

“It’s a bad idea. Bad location. Bad timing. Good for developers, though.”

“Horrible, sneaky, underhanded scheme. . . It’s a historic towpath, an urban greenspace and fragile environment. . . Stop this nonsense, Manekin.”

Also seething over the plan is Lee Davis, co-executive director of the Center for Creative Impact at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), who said the school has nine different initiatives along that stretch of Falls Road.

Having developed friendly relations with DOT staffers, he couldn’t believe what one of them told him at last week’s meeting.

“The city is literally pulling the rug out from under us”  – Lee Davis, co-executive director MICA Center for Creative Impact.

“They were saying, ‘We did traffic studies and there’s not going to be any more traffic along there in terms of quantity.’ What?” Davis marveled. “First of all, I don’t think that that’s possibly accurate, and secondly, of course it will change in quality.

A public works employee at Sisson Street told Davis that, “on average, they have about 150 vehicles going in there, and on the weekends it’s double, about 300.”

MICA owns buildings backing up to Falls Road, as well as a parcel that Davis says he discovered a couple of years ago that the school also owns between the North Avenue and Howard Street bridges.

“We’re transforming that, with a bunch of partners, into an open air green space for celebrating public art, ecology. A place where students and faculty at MICA can do to research,” he said. “MICA has been investing heavily in this huge initiative, and the city is literally pulling the rug out from under us.”

If Scott’s plan goes forward, it’s a loss not just for the school, but for all of Baltimore, he said.

“This is a historic byway in our city, it’s a gem they’re going to ruin,” he said. “This was like hearing somebody in New York say, ‘Guess what, we’re going to have garbage trucks driving along the High Line!”

Surprise Decision

City Hall’s plan to sell its transfer facility at 2840 Sisson Street and move operations down the hill to 2801 Falls Road came as a surprise to the two dozen people who attended last Monday’s meeting at the Recreation and Parks headquarters in Druid Hill Park, along with a passel of city staff.

The proposal set off a flurry of reaction and debate among community leaders and a hasty opposition campaign led by the volunteer-driven Friends of the Jones Falls.

“Don’t Trash the Falls,” says their online flier urging people to call or write city officials. Links include maps showing that the proposed site for the facility, currently a Potts & Callahan storage yard, sits next to a 100-year floodplain and is almost entirely inside the 500-year floodplain.

• Rough reception as city proposes moving Sisson Street trash drop-off center to a site along the Jones Falls (8/13/25)

A statement by Friends’ President Sandy Sparks cited the 1904 Olmsted Brothers Plan, which “identified the importance of protecting the three major stream valleys that framed the expanding city,” and inspired “the unrealized vision” for a Jones Falls Valley Park.

“That vision should not be compromised again by a short-sighted decision,” Sparks wrote, noting that her group is now working on a federally-funded strategic plan for the entire Jones Falls watershed.

Another Friends’ initiative is the Weed Warriors campaign, which twice a month sends volunteer parties out into the lower Falls Road area to plant trees and remove invasive plants, overgrowth and trash.

Developer’s Desires

The controversy is also re-opening a number of issues that have been quietly simmering for years, as developer Seawall has built on large swaths of the Remington neighborhood and approached the city repeatedly to purchase the Sisson Street parcel as well.

The trash and recycling facility sits directly across the street from Sisson East, the company’s proposed mixed-use development that’s still on the drawing board, though plans for it to include office space were recently scratched.

Emails obtained by The Brew show that conversations between Seawall and city officials over places where the waste facility could be relocated go back to at least 2018.

The “old landfill on West Cold Spring Lane across from the stump dump is the perfect location,” DPW official John Chalmers advised the Baltimore Development Corporation’s Colin Tarbert on July 30, 2018.

Easily accessible to I-83, the landfill would “provide DPW a newly-constructed modern facility at no cost to DPW,” Chalmers wrote, adding, “The redeveloped Sisson Street site would contribute significant new tax dollars to the city.”

The idea received community blowback – “we are getting slammed,” DPW’s Marcia Collins told Chalmers in one terse email – and was dropped.

This batch of emails had only a single mention of another potential relocation site – 400 West North Avenue, a former railroad yard west of the Jones Falls that was purchased in 2019 by MCBKA, an offshoot of developer David Bramble’s MCB Real Estate.

Friends of the Jones Falls and others are asking why this property, presently used to store excavation debris and equipment, wasn’t given more consideration. Sources tell The Brew that the Maryland Transit Administration, which owns the adjacent property, is concerned about letting the public come too close to its light-rail operations.

Another relocation site some have suggested is 2500 Huntingdon Avenue that comprised the 25th Street Station development to be anchored by a Wal-Mart. After that controversial project foundered, the property was acquired by Seawall.

(The Brew asked the company’s co-founder, Thibault Manekin, this morning whether Seawall would ever consider a land swap or sale to help the city find a more suitable Sisson replacement. We’ll update with any answer received.)

Triggering Touchy Issues

While none of the other players in the conversation have anything positive to say about Scott’s plan, it has reignited some old debates, such as whether Sisson could be closed without any replacement site at all. An even touchier topic suddenly being discussed is the idea closing Falls Road to through traffic.

Asked about relocating the Sisson Street operation to the Potts & Callahan site, Greater Remington Improvement Association (GRIA) president Chris Billak said the group has not yet voted on it and won’t take a position “until we see what the design actually looks like.”

Billak, a civil engineer, said he personally questions the notion of putting a trash transfer station in a floodplain.

The city had previously promised his group in years past that it would close the site altogether and encourage residents to use other DPW facilities, but that idea was opposed by other neighborhoods, according to Billak.

“During the pandemic, the city provided dumpsters for community dumpster days. It was very successful,” he pointed out.

 The many household hazardous materials now accepted at the Sisson Street Convenience Center. (DPW)

What if city officials chose to relocate the trash transfer facility somewhere else in his community, such as 400 West North Avenue or 2500 Huntingdon Avenue?

“We don’t want to see it in lower Remington,” Billak quickly replied.

Weighing in on behalf of the advocacy group Bikemore, executive director Jed Weeks said his group also has no official stance yet.

“My personal opinion is that I don’t understand the desire to relocate it to the Jones Falls Valley,” he said, adding a plug for shutting down the operation completely and not replacing it, a less car-centric approach as he sees it.

But if a DPW trash facility does wind up on Falls Road, Bikemore’s view is that the city is acting “appropriately” by closing off the road to vehicular through traffic.

“We like the the idea of doing a point closure north of the site that would allow bicyclists and pedestrians to continue on the street,” he said. “Right now people use that part of Falls Road as a shortcut to skip I-83, so they drive on it like it’s a highway to get from Hampden down to Station North or from Station North up to Hampden.”

That access, meanwhile, is exactly what many who live in those neighborhoods say they prefer.