WASHINGTON - Barbara Mikulski couldn't have set up the encounter to better advantage. Two tourists are midway through an autumn lunch on a restaurant terrace a few feet from the brick dock where Mikulski is pointing out what used to be at the tip of Fells Point - and the superhighway she helped to divert that would have replaced the horizon.
The visitors, toying with the idea of moving to Baltimore, recognize Mikulski and ask to shake her hand. That is all it takes for the three-term senator, the longest-serving woman in the U.S. Senate, up for re-election Nov. 2, to shift full-throttle into candidate mode, pointing out landmarks, rattling off job opportunities at nearby hospitals and needling Julie Kreiner, a computer store inventory manager from Oak Park, Ill., and Harriet Coles, a physical therapist from Chicago, to vote for Barack Obama, a Democrat running for a Senate seat in Illinois. "If you can't vote for me, vote for him," Mikulski says, flashing a fleeting smile.
"Now, about Fells Point: This is the center of everything. If you go up two blocks, there's a Long and Foster Realtor's office. You're in the shadow of Johns Hopkins. Liz," she motions to an aide, "get their information so we can send them something."
Then Mikulski is back on the damp cobblestones where Broadway dead-ends at Thames Street. In real estate, location is everything. Same goes for Maryland's junior senator. This is where her story took root.
Four stories above the lunching ladies, balconies and windows wrap Mikulski's hometown office on three sides.
From the senator's birch desk, the view takes in the curve of Fort McHenry, the former Domino Sugar factory and Federal Hill. Mikulski, 68, daughter of a grocer and granddaughter of a baker, keeps her window cracked open to hear the noises of the working port.
Ground zero
All of this is Mikulski's ground zero, the scene of a disaster averted, a place where harbor would have been earth-filled and hills would have been leveled in a colossal transportation project designed to link Interstate 83 to Interstate 95 in a three-mile dogleg through Southeast Baltimore. In all, 16 lanes of asphalt would have been laid through the Inner Harbor, meeting in a cloverleaf at about the spot where 13 million visitors descend each year on Harborplace. Thousands of homes and businesses several blocks inland on both sides of the water were plowed under, and thousands more were slated for demolition before the project was halted.
