Arundel's 'main drag' a trip through rural, urban history When it opened in 1940, Route 2 was envisioned as a scenic parkway

Motorists curse it, bless it, drive it, eat, pray, play, shop and work along it.

Nobody, from passing tourists and new residents to state legislators, comes into Anne Arundel County without coping at some point with Route 2.

The 41.4-mile highway sweeps from one end of the county to the other, lined by a mind-numbing array of -- count them -- 54 shopping centers, 66 fast-food places, 25 churches and 128 car dealerships, parts and repair shops. Not to mention homes, farms, snowball stands, palm readers and tattoo parlors.

"It's the main drag for everyone," says Sandy Mansberger.

She knows, because every workday she rides from her Brooklyn Park home to her Pasadena job on the No. 14 bus along the commercialized four-lane stretch of Route 2 known as Ritchie Highway.

Forty miles south, Eugene Hardesty uses the two-lane undivided portion that is Solomons Island Road from his farm in Friendship to Annapolis, past horse farms and tobacco, corn and soybean fields.

In between, in Arnold, where 40,000 cars a day rush by at 50 mph to 60 mph, Janet Griffin has learned in 33 years of living on the northbound side of Ritchie Highway how to deftly time exits from her driveway to the rhythm of a traffic signal at a cross street.

The gulf between the lives of those who live at opposite ends of Route 2 attest to the highway's stature as the main drag through the county's history. Its mile markers show the transformation Anne Arundel has undergone since the days Baltimoreans considered it a mosquito-infested wasteland leading to nettle-filled Chesapeake Bay.

The road was built in the 1930s as a fast, scenic route to take big-city folks to the few Anne Arundel County destinations they cared to get to -- particularly the State House and the Naval Academy -- without having to meander over twisty Baltimore-Annapolis Boulevard through fields of strawberries and corn.

It accomplished that, but at a cost. A magnet for merchants and developers who lusted at the steady stream of traffic if offered, Route 2 has become a symbol throughout Maryland for overdevelopment.

The only scenery along much of the route now has been planned, planted and paid for by the state; panhandlers work the medians, vandals and thieves race its lanes getting away, and so many drivers crash or get jammed in stop-and-go traffic that Baltimoreans en route to Annapolis ultimately demanded yet another bypass -- Interstate 97.

Before the Ritchie Highway section of Route 2 was built, life was less complicated. For entertainment, the Glen Burnie area was home to the state's first drive-in movie theater in the 1930s and a drive-in restaurant where waitresses came to the cars with trays that hooked onto the driver's-side window.

"The whole area where B&A Boulevard and Mountain Road cross -- all of that was farmland," said Alfred J. Lipin, 77, known as the mayor of Glen Burnie.

Then came Gov. Albert Cabell Ritchie -- at least Motor Vehicle Administration lore has it this way -- who grabbed a map, circled Annapolis and then Baltimore, drew a straight line between the two and said, "Build it here."

Was that really the origin of the modern Ritchie Highway? "I wouldn't be surprised," said Edward H. Meehan, a longtime employee of the Anne Arundel County Public Works Department. "It's as straight as an arrow."

The road shot past land farmed by Jane Pumphrey Nes' great-grandfather in Glen Burnie. Nes recalls when construction began on Ritchie Highway, the state's first dual highway, in 1934. "I remember how proud we were when the Ritchie Highway was being constructed, how modern and splendid it seemed," she wrote in a memoir last year for the Anne Arundel County Historical Society.

Its construction was an event that marked families' lives. Retired Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Warren Duckett Jr.'s father took part in it. An inspector approving bridge, concrete and construction work on northern parts of Ritchie Highway, "he went to work very, very, very early, and came home very, very, very, late," Duckett said. His father sometimes stayed away from home for a week, working in Glen Burnie on the landmark road, Duckett said.

the $2.25 million highway -- named for the man who supposedly drew its path -- opened in fall 1939, a year before Ritchie died.

In April 1940, a daylong official opening parade at the Severn River Bridge with bands and floats attracted 1,500 people.

The original plans included no businesses. "It was supposedly intended to be this kind of scenic parkway that would connect Annapolis and Baltimore," said Anne Arundel County historian Donna Ware. It was to be free of commerce, like the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, she said.

An attempt was made to keep it that way -- at first.

The Roadside Beautification Council of Maryland sponsored a campaign "to show the people of Maryland what can be done to preserve scenic beauty," according to a Feb. 25, 1935, Sun article. Signs at each end of the road asked advertisers to leave the scenery unmarred.