Forget It Jake It's Baltimore

Jones Falls MD

 From the Bay Journal, Proposed Baltimore waste site now eyed for streamside park

Sometimes problems turn into opportunities, lemons into lemonade.

Only time will tell, but that could be what’s playing out with Baltimore’s Jones Falls, the long-abused stream that flows through the heart of the city before emptying into the Inner Harbor. Last summer, Baltimore’s public works department proposed moving a trash and recycling drop-off station from a bluff overlooking the falls in the Remington neighborhood. The new spot: even closer to the stream, just across the two-lane Falls Road.

The announcement sparked an outcry and a “Don’t Trash the Falls” campaign. Residents, environmentalists and even local businesses warned that the new site was flood prone and likely to increase pollution and litter in the stream. They feared the move would also dash community hopes to eventually transform the once-industrial Jones Falls valley into a magnet for outdoor recreation and tourism.

The uproar prompted Mayor Brandon Scott to put the move on hold and form a task force to study the issue. After several months of back and forth, the group could not agree on a suitable alternative site for the drop-off center. Then, in March, the script flipped. The developer whose interest in acquiring the existing drop-off site had triggered the relocation plan instead struck a deal to buy the construction equipment yard on Falls Road where the city had wanted to move it.

And while developer Thibault Manekin said the firm he co-founded, Seawall, wants to build something there — maybe housing, shops or both — he sees converting most of the rough-looking tract into park-like green space.

Jones Falls advocates welcomed the news, though with some wariness borne of decades of fighting to protect and clean up the stream. Sandy Sparks, president of the Friends of Jones Falls, calls the potential development a “fantastic opportunity.”

When life gives you landfills, make parks.