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:

View Larger Map

..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