A Neighborhood by Any Other Name

3.2005

Urbanite Magazine

The Patapsco River has been good to Baltimore’s renaissance. It gave the city a reason to rebuild the Inner Harbor, Fells Point, Canton, Locust Point and Inner Harbor East.

Now, the river that natives call the “Pat-aps-i-co” has one last frontier to offer the Baltimore revival. It is the most convenient of places for commuters and downtown workers to live-but the least likely place to imagine new development.

You can find it driving south on Hanover Street over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge. Look off to the right. There it is-the river’s Middle Branch, a near-rectangular body of water, scarred by a stunning array of abandoned industrial buildings bordering some of the city’s poorest communities.
Cherry Hill. Westport. Mount Winans. Lakeland. Names associated for decades with poverty and decay.

Not names mentioned in the same breath with words like “upscale,” or “luxury.” Or with a price tag of $400,000 for a townhouse.

Until now.

Developers, lured by a blank slate (after the old industrial buildings and a hillside of trees are removed), see potential for residential and commercial development just blocks from the I-95 and 295 ramps, walking distance to the light rail, and a few-minutes drive to downtown.

Above a hillside overlooking Middle Branch Park and the Baltimore Rowing Club, developer A. Rod Womack is planning a $35 million project called Waterview Overlook with 40 luxury townhouses and 65 condominiums. Womack’s Consolidated Investment & Management Group hopes to complete the project by 2006. It will include a tennis court, pool, fitness center and a clubhouse, he says.

On eighteen acres along the river’s western shore, the former factory of the Carr-Lowrey Glass Company will be torn down and replaced with a residential and commercial development, says developer Patrick Turner of Henrietta Development Corporation. Details of the project, located steps way from the Westport light rail stop, have yet to be finalized, he says.

Just north of the 115-year-old glass factory, two enormous abandoned Baltimore Gas and Electric Buildings are up for sale, says Keith Cunningham, spokesman for Constellation Energy, which oversees the properties.

And at the north side of the bridge, the National Aquarium is planning a Center for Aquatic Life and Conservation on nineteen acres that will include a garage renovated into an environmentally “green” building where sick animals will receive care, an education center, plus restored wetlands and a park. The project will begin in 2006.

“We love the idea of being part of another waterfront renovation in the city,” says Molly Foyle, the Aquarium’s director of media relations.

Unlike investors of Fells Point or Federal Hill, who three decades ago used the famous historic names to lure high prices for homes and businesses (and unofficially expanded their boundaries to increase real estate prices), developers of the Middle Branch want to exploit the waterfront convenience, but not the community names that carry the negative connotations of an impoverished city.

So they have come up with a new, unofficial (and somewhat controversial) name-Inner Harbor West.

The name has already been purchased as an Internet domain name (innerharborwest.com), though a website has yet to be built.

Womack admits he was wary of building in Cherry Hill at first. But that was before he saw the land he would eventually purchase-and before he met Cherry Hill leaders who are working to turn the neighborhood around.

He said he told a friend, “I don’t know if Cherry Hill has come far enough to do this deal. Then I walked up on one of those hills.” Once he saw the view of the water and downtown, “It hit me. I saw the potential.”

He’s been working closely with the Cherry Hill community and doesn’t want any negative neighborhood image to reflect on his project.

“I don’t even want to attach the notion of a stigma. They have done a tremendous job to turn the neighborhood around.”

Cathy McClain, executive director of Cherry Hill 2000, an umbrella group of community groups, institutions and businesses, says her group supports Womack’s development.

“Rod was very good in coming to us to tell us what he was planning. We’re pleased he’s bringing an expensive product to Cherry Hill to improve the economic picture for the whole neighborhood,” she says, yet adding that she is concerned with protecting older homeowners from being forced out by rising property taxes.

The residents of Cherry Hill, she says, have worked hard to reduce crime and build affordable housing in a neighborhood that was burdened with an absurdly high concentration of public housing-1,500 units at one time.

Nevertheless, she said she understands Womack’s reluctance to market the homes with the neighborhood’s name.

“If you call it Cherry Hill people would not come. I understand that,” she says.
Less than a mile away, on the Western bank of the river, three other communities-Mount Winans, Westport and Lakeland-work to reduce crime, help residents pay utility bills and promote homeownership. Their community umbrella group is located two blocks from the waterfront, on a shabby, gap-toothed stretch of Annapolis Road. The group, Project TOOUR (Teaching Our Own Understanding and Responsibility), has its office in a boarded storefront protected by a rusty security gate, with the entrance on the side.

TOOUR’s executive director, Linda Towe, hopes the new development will help revive her neighborhood.

“Once that waterfront is developed, it’s going to have a ripple effect,” Towe says, though she too is concerned about rising property taxes for older homeowners.

But she doesn’t like the idea of renaming the community “Inner Harbor West.”

“They didn’t change Canton’s name. They didn’t change Federal Hill’s name. Westport and Cherry Hill should be able to keep their names. If people knew it as Westport for worse, they should know it as Westport for the better,” she says.

Long-time Westport resident and activist Elizabeth Arnold also supports the development, but is wary.

“You want to see improvement in the city, but you don’t want to be run out,” she says.

The city’s planning department is taking steps to protect the old neighborhoods, making sure a master plan preserves public views of the water and keeps tall buildings away from nearby rowhouses.

The city also hopes to make the waterfront more accessible to people in Westport, who have been cut off from the shoreline by industrial property.

“We’re using the powers we have to protect the community and make sure there is affordable housing and economic diversity,” says City Planning Director Otis Rolley.

With all the talk about redeveloping the Middle Branch, the waterfront neighborhood-whatever you call it-is still pretty quiet these days.

Along Middle Branch Park, the city’s Baltimore Rowing Club and Water Resource Center sits alone on the bank, looking just as out of place as it did when it was built in 1986-a monument to one of the most peculiar brainchilds of the mayoral administration of William Donald Schaefer.

Sculling, after all, was never the pastime of neighbors struggling to find work and decent housing.

But soon, the boathouse could finally have compatible neighbors.

“At long last,” says Cherry Hill’s Cathy McClain with a smile, “It was a project before its time.”