[bet your life that your sweet wife is gonna catch more fish than you...]
Way back when in the not-as-chilly month of October, Dana and I went on a bike ride from (Hampden/Butcher's Hill to) downtown to Port Covington, the little V-shaped peninsula-ish strip south of Federal Hill, where the Hanover Street Bridge connects mainland Baltimore to the wilds of Brooklyn, Cherry Hill and Curtis Bay over the Middle Branch of the Patapsco. There's a Wal-Mart there, and the Baltimore Sun's printing facility, but mostly it's pretty barren.
We went mostly because the Middle Branch is allegedly the next (or maybe last?) big strip of waterfront property to be developed in the city, with all sorts of potential for that gospel idea that Bmore pols are looking for these days, referred-to alternately as Mixed Use, Live Where Work, Live Shop Work Play Eat, or First Floor Retail. Personally, I've not written a lot about Port Covington at my day job, but that just might be because it's so far down the city's wish list that not a lot is going to happen there in the next decade.
What we found was, there are some folks that prefer it that way.
[weeds]
The above is what the mouth of the Middle Branch looks like over the mess of weeds and chain-link at that very bottom tip of Port Covington. It's absolutely overgrown and filthy, with trash everywhere, but clear evidence that partying/bonfiring had been going on. It also looked like it ought to take about two seconds to bulldoze all the overgrowth and nonsense standing in the way of someone paving over paradise for a condo tower or whatever. But when we went further down to the water, we found a little square cement patio ("We could play foursquare here!" Dana said, predictably) with evidence of picknicking, and beyond that, a strip of riprap where we found this fellow:
[i'ma gon' fishin' too...]
This guy said his name was James, and he was fishing with grass shrimp bait for rockfish and bass. He told us he'd caught 45-inchers on this site before, which struck me as a slightly frightening prospect because of how close to, and bound-in by industrial pollution sites Port Covington is. He added that over the years the fish have dwindled, but he still fishes every Saturday. How postmodern, I thought -- the 21st century hobo, fishing outside the Wal-Mart.
What struck me mainly about Port Covington was not that it was such a terrible use of potentially beautiful waterfront property but that it was such a recent terrible use of waterfront property. Putting a remote, car-access-only big box retailer next to a big newspaper printing facility, all in a completely unwelcoming office park makes no sense to me in this day and age, and I think both buildings were built in the last 30 years. First of all, where's the market for the Wal Mart coming from? Across the bridge? Federal Hill? Second, aren't we in the age of What A Water View Can Do? In Baltimore especially, I'd expect this sort of parcel of land, if it was indeed bare and not occupied by troublesome factories or brownfields to be snatched up and developed as a people place shortly after the Inner Harbor was.
Anyway, that's what's happening slightly to the north in the southern part of Riverside, another stop on our bike ride. Except there's no water view (only a CSX rail yard). Cool place though.
The following buildings were side by side, and I shot them because the one on the right (which is where it appeared on the street) is the type of building that I really go for -- inornate, elegant, simple red-brick factory type deals that are built to last and full of character (KB would say -- "It's just a building, Robbie"), while the one staring it in the face across the street is a god-awful example of spaceship-from-hell modern low-budg architecture. The one on the right is luxury condos (obviously) while the one of the left was, I believe, a medical center. I don't get why developers, at least in this town, see no value in contextualizing architecture, especially in a place where you're trying to attract skilled or innovative workers and people with money, to live and work there. Doesn't anyone have any taste?
[a study in contrastualization]
To the west of these monsters, we've got the building that I recently learned is David Simon's favorite in building in Baltimore, for really predictable, pinko commie reasons about how it represents blue-collar workers undivorced from their product and its means of production (could he be any more obvious a Marxist?), the Pabst Castle. This is a dope building, I think, not because it evokes the dignity of Scotland or whatever Simon said, but because it looks so German to me, like a Gingerbread House in the Black Forest. And what could possibly go better with the whole ethos of PBR? It's a hipster beer, and hipsters long to return to their childhood fantasies of castles and forts and sweet-n-spicy cookies...
[the castle]
[the sign]
And finally, here's a picture of my bike, which I've dubbed Icey Smoove, because I really like my bike. It's a Belgian-made Flandria from the 80s that MacGruder Bernstein gave me this summer, and it's DOPE:
[icey smoove]
Coming up next, the little-known South Baltimore barbecue place where Dana and I ate!
Also, check out my latest review from El Papel de la Ciudad.
3 comments:
Does "mixed use" zoning mean you can put essentially whatever you want into an area? And if so, are there any other overarching organizing principles to land use in Baltimore other than zoning? If not, maybe that could be part of the reason it's being used so badly in that area; the people who built the press, wal-mart, and office park sound like they just picked that lot because the price and zoning were right, not because they required or planned to "use" the waterfront per se ...
Elizabeth --
"mixed use," as described in this blog post, actually refers to a buzzword used by city pols and businesspeople that happens to be very au courant, and it doesn't refer to zoning per se -- more the actual end use as a mixture of commericial (retail, entertainment, service), residential (apts, condos, townhomes), and office space. however, in baltimore, as i imagine is the case in many other places, mixed-use development usually requires what's called a PUD (Planned Unit Development), which is a law signed into being by the city that effectively overlays one or more zoning definitions overtop another. A PUD is sometimes referred to as a "zoning variance". Harbor East, the huge, vastly expensive mix of condos, hotels, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, boat slips, public park spaces, and bread factories just east of the Inner Harbor, is the most current and relevant example of what I'm talking about -- it required a PUD to become what it is.
All those there words are just a long way of saying that I don't think zoning is what stands in the way of developing places like Port Covington, because zoning variances are so easily available when they're needed. So while there may be zoning issues at PC that I'm not aware of, my point in the blog post is that unoptimal use of waterfront property, which these days is considered incredibly valuable, is a thing of the past, and because Port Covington's developments are relatively new, it's sort of appalling to me that an incredibly un-dense mix of commercial and industrial properties are wasting the potential of such potentially productive and attractive land.
also, which Elizabeth is this? Do we know each other?
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