My Neighborhood's got a hole in it!

The Charles Village neighborhood in Baltimore is a dense, older residential neighborhood circa 1910's, highly walkable with moderate mixed-use zoning.

It's the kind of neighborhood that can make even suburbanites reconsider living in the city. This is a little ironic considering Charles Village itself was established as a streetcar suburb--I believe a car ran up and down St. Paul street before being torn out in the middle of the century.

Today the low 3000's blocks of St. Paul street are the commercial hub of the neighborhood. There's a small grocery, restaurants, coffee shops--and -sigh- new modern condominiums. All in all its an interesting, useful, part of the neighborhood

To some it may even sound like a new-urban paradise--but there is something strange happening here too.
In the heart of this very valuable area is a large field of weeds. Its empty, fenced-off, and it's been this way for years.



Why?

According to a very informative article in the Johns Hopkins Newsletter, a row of turn-of-the-century row homes being used as JHU frat houses and a convenience store were demolished in 2006 to make way for a supposed new block of condos.

'The Olmstead' as it was to be called, has failed to materialize. In the mean time, where there once were people and businesses there is now nothing.


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The developer, Struever Brothers, Eccles & Rouse, had already built another block of ugly, boring, could-have-been-built-anywhere condos across the street. They didn't sell so well, and now it seems that The Olmstead is on hold until the market picks back up.
The bad news is, this is what they said in 2007--that's BEFORE the "credit-crunch" hit the fan!
I guess we could all be waiting a while.

I laughed when I visited the Streuver Bro's website--they claim to be "transforming America's cities." I may just be a cynic, but I think its fair to say that in this case they are transforming my neighborhood into a wasteland.

The sad part , in my opinion, is that the only thing this neighborhood can look forward to someday, is the arrival of another profit-extracting monstrosity when the yuppies finally feel like their portfolios have recovered.

I realize that developers are a fact of life. Private property is good. My only question is this: Should a neighborhood as a community have any say in the evolution of their built environment?

I wish that beautiful old buildings didn't have to be demolished.

I wish they didn't have to be replaced by bland, hulking, over-sized, cynically 'modern' buildings. And furthermore, I wish that 'mixed use' didn't have to mean chain stores. Isn't that what the suburbs are for?

I wish that a lovely neighborhood in a city generally plagued by decay didn't have to be exploited to grow.

I'll be very interested to see what ever becomes of the Olmstead.
~
-finally posting again after a LONG summer vacation!
~
UPDATED: here. Feb 2010.

Mount Vernon Mnemonic

The Mount Vernon neighborhood in Baltimore is the cities oldest, and in my opinion, its prettiest district. There are some fine photos on another blog here.

Here's a funny acrostic mnemonic device I made up the other day for remembering the streets that constitute Mount Vernon.
In the course of a volunteer job I undertake a few times monthly, Ive found myself wishing I had a better grasp of the area...and thus, my mnemonic:

West to East streets:

Mnemonic	Street
Howard's	Howard
Pet	Park
Cat	Cathedral
Challenged	Charles
St. Paul's	St. Paul
Calf	Calvert
Greatly	Guilford

North to South streets:

Mnemonic	Street
Mr.	Mount Royal
Peanut	Preston
Brought	Biddle
Chase	Chase
Eagerly	Eager
Rallied	Read
More	Madison
Men	Monument
Clamoring	Center
For	Franklin
Mulberries	Mulberry

enjoy!

Sitting around Baltimore

I wanted to write a quick post about the 'urban stoop'--the small stairway used both to reach the entrance of a city dwelling and as informal social stage--before 'stoop culture' dries up again for the year.

Baltimore has thousands of stoops (on account of her thousands of row homes), and as a result of this fact, is historically well known for its 'stoop culture'--the culture of interactions taking place between friends, citizens and strangers as they sit on their stoops or walk by on the sidewalks.

As the colder weather arrives and people are pushed indoors, the streets start to revert to an emptier state and I am caught thinking about the emptying stoops and reflecting on their peculiar value to a neighborhood.


A stoop.

The stoop asks interesting questions about the way a buildings design influences the social interactions that can occur around it.

If there are utilized stoops, there are 'eyes on the street'. A neighborhood is lively and safer. Perhaps, though, residents want more privacy or more comfort? Porches offer these these qualities more abundantly, but because they are more withdrawn from the street, create less safety, in theory.

A stoop seems better than a porch at catalyzing social interaction and maintaining community safety when a certain level of safety is already present, and probably a little worse (than porches) when there's little or no pretext of street safety.

The stoop is an interesting element to consider as it applies to the concept of New Urbanism--the renewed interest promoting, creating and living in walkable, mixed use (dwellings, businesses and services in close proximity) urban neighborhoods.

What kind of social environment will people who want a 'new urbanism' be interested in? Will they want stoops? Will they sit outside or people watch? Or will they want to dash down the steps to their waiting smartcars?









A collection of porch stairs and stoops from around Charles Village, Baltimore. Baltimore is known for its large supply of stoops.

This apartment building on Calvert street exemplifies one way it can go. It features a sort of modified stoop--pretty much too narrow to sit on and facing the wrong way-- useful only as a way to get in and out.


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Heres another view, from the alley, showing how the straighter, wider stoops only face one another inside the protective courtyard and fence. Why not just build a porch?

Who is going to sit on these stoops, if anyone? There are no people, buildings or traffic to watch inside a courtyard.

Perhaps the people who live here don't have time to watch anyone. Perhaps there are no nearby stores, or little street traffic anyway. I wonder how this building development has and will continue to impact it's surrounding neighborhood.

I don't want to come across as 'pro' or 'anti' stoop; only to consider the wide-ranging effects of a minor design decision.


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Pretty Ruins

There is a certain building, standing on a (frankly) ugly section of street several blocks south of my home, for which I have a strange affection, despite its being in a nearly complete state of ruin.

I like the home because of its unique brickwork, tall windows and interesting 'pistachio' paint-job. I decided to write about my affection for the home after I recently discovered 2 tidbits relating to its existence.


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First, while googling some addresses as a time-waster, I found a photo of the home in 2006 and was shocked by its much superior condition. Its obvious that a fire occurred on the second floor sometime between September 2006 and 2008. The internet was unable to bring me any details of this unfortunate event.

-->Beautiful photos of the home, pre-crumble, on Flickr here: thepeoplemachine.
(Via Flickr.)

According to city records (If you have time, check out this cool tool.) the home was built in 1890 (along with many homes of the Charles Village district) and is currently owned by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. I sincerely hope they do not plan to demolish it (they own nearly the whole block it is situated in)--although, I don't know who would possibly be able to front the money to repair it.

Ok, second, also by way of the net, I learned about an artistic revitalization effort focusing on the 2100 block of N. Calvert, called Axis Alley. Its goal, from its website here, is to activate the back alleys of Baltimore and explore the "toxic beauty" and "fascinating possibility of urban intervention and creative gesture" by installation of art/design works in the alleys behind distressed buildings and spaces.

I especially like the phrase "toxic beauty". I feel like this is exactly what drew me to this home and this block in the first place.

Sadly, the deadline for submissions has passed, but it appears applications for proposed projects will perhaps continue to be accepted on an ongoing basis, so who knows, perhaps I will have an opportunity to interact with my favorite building in a more personal way.

Veggie-scaping

Observant people going past Baltimore City Hall lately will have noticed that the edge planters around War Memorial plaza have been transformed into vegetable gardens. The Sun mentioned the change here.

According to the article, there is quite a cornucopia under way, including:
rhubarb, cucumbers, acorn squash, cabbage, lettuce, peppers, kale, sweet corn, red mustard greens, leeks, swiss chard,kohlrabi, beets, sweet potatoes, celery, cherry tomatoes, radishes, carrots, onions, eggplant,zucchini and various herbs!

Woah!

In fact, I've been noticing quite number of small vegetable garden patches popping up this spring. In the Charles Village neighborhood of Baltimore, where I live, Ive seen 5 or more blocks with at least one 'font yard' garden--a small vegetable garden in a space which last year was lawn.


[image from revivevictorygarden.org.]


The famous Obama vegetable garden, ( I couldn't believe this was wikified,-- god bless Wikipedia!) would like to claim some credit as the agitator of the recent bloom of unique-space vegetable gardens, but I think it's just as likely the souring economy as anything--so come to think of it, I guess that means Bush gets the credit.

Anyway, regardless of why, it's clear that when people have more free time and less money, gardening, especially in urban environments, makes sense.

As for the Baltimore veggie gardens, from a purely economic viewpoint, using public space to grow food for impoverished people (as will be done with the Baltimore crop) is most likely inefficient.

Paying city workers to tend small, mixed plots can never be as cost effective as, for instance, buying vegetables wholesale for distribution at food banks. But while this would be cheaper, it would probably be neither encouraging sustainable or organic agriculture, nor a departure from the generic 'script' for using city space and money.

Mayor Sheila Dixon hopes that the Baltimore vegetable gardens will

"show that...an urban environment...can still maintain healthy eating."

--which is important, yes--but I think whats most notable about the project is that it shows dramatically how urban space can be put to innovative uses.

Courtyards, empty lots, parking decks could offer the city more than bland expanses of eyesore. They could offer engagement-- and purpose.


[A variation on the urban vertical farm, a "farmscraper" (image from treehugger.com.) ]


Community gardens, allotment gardens (both of which can be found in Baltimore), green roofs, green walls and even extreme implementations like guerrilla gardens (is that what these are called?) and farmscrapers are all transformative uses for urban space which make environments aesthetically pleasing (by including growing life), useful, edible and engaging--in short, livable.


[A green wall made of melon plants at the Itabashi Primary school in Tokyo. (from Wikipedia)]


In the past month I've noticed two of the tiny lawns on my block have been torn out and replaced with small vegetable gardens, and I think it's a good sign.

Small private patches, community projects and municipal projects all engage the city in different ways, on different scales, but they make the city a more interesting place to be.


-G

Disappearing city

Last week my bus had to take a detour as it traveled south down Greenmount, a major artery passing through a worn-down, low rent, yet busy part of the center city. The reason for this departure from tradition was the apparent collapse of a three story brick row home/ground level commercial space at Greenmount and Preston St. Piles of brick blocked the road and police held back bystanders from the rubble. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me on that day; but I did on next:



Its sad, but building decay is becoming a major issue for some U.S. cities on the East Coast and Midwest. Many architecturally significant buildings stand vacant in economically depressed or otherwise undesirable areas and as they approach 100 and 150 years, the elements begin to slowly take their toll.

Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us goes into great detail on how long human structures can last when we aren't taking care of them--and once water is allowed to enter a structure, it usually isn't very long.

Baltimore is fast becoming a perfect example of what a city with too many forgotten buildings comes to look like. The suspicious empty grass lots to be found at the corners of blocks in certain Baltimore neighborhoods are not the planned gardens and green spaces they might appear to be, but actually uncontrolled, "natural", like-it-or-not demolition of the city's built heritage.

A good example of this phenomenon can be seen on Google streetview here.
Is that what the corner of Greenmount and Preston will look like in 5 years?

Here's the corner of the block (courtesy Google) before this week:

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..and as it is now.



It may not have been a building worth preserving, but I doubt it was a building worth demolishing. I think that during a period in which people put so little thought into building sustainably (see: suburbia) the loss of even one medium density building with potential charm and a real history is sad. The funny thing is, these buildings were the suburban tract homes of the 1910's!--except then they were served by streetcars and supported a denser population.

A cool site I discovered recently, Built St Louis, discusses this issue in depth as it occurs in St. Louis, MO. Both Baltimore and St. Louis have been struck by similar historical misfortunes (B.S.L. outlines them very well here.) including white flight to the suburbs and the resulting population loss. In the 1950's Baltimore had a population nearing a million. That number teeters around only 650,000 today. Nobody's left around to take care of all the elderly buildings. sad!

-G

Day one

I will have been living in the city of Baltimore for one year come the end of may, 2009. Although there are many interesting things to do and see here, I have become increasingly interested in the stories and significance of the buildings I pass each day.

I wanted to create this blog in order to motivate myself to uncover the details about the interesting places I pass each day and at the same time make these discoveries available to anyone who cares to know.

As my profile bio says, I hope that by learning about the design decisions, history and movements that have shaped my favorite structures, I will be able to appreciate them even more.


Although I have always been interested in cities, buildings and urban planning, I am embarrassed to say that I feel I don't know nearly enough about the topic for my satisfaction.

Sim City taught me to keep the yellow zones away from the green; but when it comes to differentiating beaux-arts and baroque, I feel I have insufficient funds.

I have recently begun reading The Look of Architecture, a very small, fun, accessible set of lectures delivered by Witold Rybczynski, professor of urbanism at Penn and writer for Slate.

One opinion he mentioned that caught my attention was the assertion of the absolute necessity of physically experiencing a building (as opposed to photographically experiencing it) when trying to form an opinion of a designers work.

It is a sad fact that although I am familiar with the names like Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, I.M. Pei, Frank Lloyd Wright, to my knowledge I have never been inside one of their buildings.

The results of quick internet research reveal that Baltimore is in fact home to 2 structures by van der Rohe (an office tower and an apartment building a short walk from my home) and 1 tower by I.M Pei--and thus I begin a slow exploration. Hopefully I'll be able to visit these three buildings soon--and why? to see what I think.

In the mean time, I will be adding links to the left which I find helpful or interesting.

-G