King's Legacy, King's Boulevard

"Today we celebrate a win-win-win situation. It's a win for our country, and a win for Baltimore city, and a win for the people who are going to live and work here...I remember when I used to serve on the Poppleton Board back in 1979. Back then the biggest fear was that the University of Maryland would come across Martin Luther King. But then there came some visionaries. And some of them are sitting right behind me. There are visionaries on both sides of MLK."

- U.S. Congressman Elijah Cummings, March 31, 2008

"If you find yourself on 'Martin Luther King Boulevard', run!...I don't care where you live in America, if you're on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there's some violence going on."

- Chris Rock

Last Monday, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had a big, swanky catered event, complete with cheesy jazz-pop band and pesto-mozzarella finger sandwiches, to celebrate two things: the opening of Building II, and the groundbreaking of Building III at their new west side BioPark.


[breaking ground: mayor sheila dixon, elijah cummings, gov. martin o'malley, sen. ben cardin, and UMB president david j. ramsay]

I've been writing about these developments for the Daily Record, and you can see some of those articles here. But what I wanted to talk about here, on the blog, is a more abstract idea about city planning, and specifically, about physical barriers between people of different race and class, their intent, their development, and their meaning.

Specifically, I'm talking about Martin Luther King Jr., Blvd, a 2-mile, six lane artery that snakes its way downtown from the Mt. Royal cultural district, near the Lyric Opera House and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, all the way to the area near M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens play, and where MLK blends into I-395 South and lulls you into a sense of false security and purposefulness as you drive towards the cesspool that is Washington, D.C.

To the east of this road lie a number of neighborhoods: Mt. Vernon, Westside, Downtown, Ridgely's Delight. To the west lies the vast tract of rowhouses and mostly-African-American neighborhoods known as West Baltimore (too many individual neighborhoods to name). It's the setting for HBO's The Wire. It's the neighborhood H.L. Mencken grew up in. It's where Baltimore's black cultural district once thrived along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The significance of the University of Maryland's hopping across MLK Blvd is that ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years ago (basically, any time since Brown v. Board of Education and white flight), such a thing would never have happened. West Baltimore is black, poor, abandoned, run-down, ghettoized, and full of crime and drugs (ever watch the Wire, anyone?). And MLK Blvd, according to Marxist historian and former Johns Hopkins professor David Harvey, "creates an easily patrolled line of defense between the mass of downtown buildings and low-income and largely African-American communities of West Baltimore.")


[west baltimore rowhouses]

One important piece of Baltimore history that allowed for the UMB BioPark project to go forward was the demolition of the Murphy Homes, a notoriously dangerous high-rise housing project near MLK Jr. Blvd and Franklin Street, which around there becomes MD-40 west, a road that goes through many of West Baltimore's trouble spots (Edmonson Village, Woodlawn) and continues out past the beltway on the Frederick.

Throughout the 1990s, the Murphy Homes were a total hotbed of criminal activity. I read a really interesting story about 'Itchy Man' in the Baltimore Sun, an alleged murderer and drug dealer who once scaled an outer wall of the 14-story project while running from the cops, then hid in a garbage chute for hours while more that 50 cops and FBI agents searched for him, unsuccessfully. But then again, that article was written by Jim Haner, who my boss here at TDR says was the basis for F. Scott Templeton, the fabulist reporter from season 5 of the Wire, which means that it can't entirely be trusted.

Another Sun article, from the day before the Murphy Homes were demolished in 1999, calls Baltimore's public housing "an idea for sheltering the poor born of utopian theories and segregation," citing Le Corbusier's idea of "the flattening of crime-ridden 'cities of horror' and replacing them with 'radiant cities' of high-rises with wide plazas and expressways between them."

MLK Jr. Blvd, and Route 40, for that matter, could definitely be thought of as one of those expressways.

David Harvey, in a discussion about MLK Jr. Blvd and its role as a "strong physical barrier between the University of Maryland medical campus and the tenements," dryly observed, "In a society that is officially against racial discrimination and for democracy, we're increasingly building isolated communities that are often racially discriminatory."

There are over 500 streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. in American cities, mostly in the South, and many of them go through predominantly black neighborhoods. Interesting factoid: Wal-Mart opposed the re-naming of MLK Jr. Blvd in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Another reason to hate Wal-Mart. If only their DVD players weren't so damn cheap...


[the site of BioPark building III, from a nearby parking garage]

What's going to happen, no doubt -- and I say this as a member of the real estate press corps, and it's based on a long period of monitoring housing prices in West Baltimore -- is that several neighborhoods around the UMB development will be gentrified. They include Hollins Market, Union Square, Poppleton, and Pigtown. It's already happening, and seems pretty inevitable, although in each of those neighborhoods there are barriers (bars of ill repute, open-air drug markets, bad schools) that need to be overcome first. The fate of the people who live their now is pretty up in the air. My personal, cynical view, is that it won't be the mixed-income paradise, white and black holding hands and planting community gardens in the medians, that the city wants. But it will likely be better, less violent, and cleaner.

But another issue to think about is the return of HOPE-VI housing, which I blogged about here. In the late 90s, Baltimore knocked down 4 large public housing projects using HUD money, with plans to rebuild them as the type of low-rise, mixed-income, old-fashioned housing personified by Heritage Crossing, the development that replaced Murphy Homes. If a democrat wins the presidency in November, it's likely that the HOPE-VI program will be revitalized, and this sort of thing will be happening more and more.

And so, a week after the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination -- What does it mean that the legacy of that great man's name is tied inextricably to an urban design technique that may, at one point, have been based on good intentions, but now is associated with segregation, ghettos, and poverty?

I don't really have the answer, but it's something I been pondering, y'all.