THEY WANT TO demolish a big stretch of the Jones Falls Expressway? Good. Can I push the plunger? Tell you how we finance this thing: Have a raffle -- $5 a chance. The person with the winning ticket gets to push the plunger that causes a series of implosions in the big, stupid concrete supports of this big, stupid overhead highway, turning the last dreadful mile into a long heaping pile of dust and twisted reinforcing rods. Cheers and screams, I tell you. This city will have a party.
I'm with the visionaries on this: Snap off the JFX where it makes engineering and architectural sense -- somewhere around Penn Station -- and turn it into a tree-lined boulevard all the way to the harbor. And I'll go one better: Add a little bit of Venice at its terminus.
I am already looking forward to a Baltimore without that ugly elevated highway.
I know such a thing is hard to imagine. I once stood in a Baltimore house, where a contractor named Skeeter was preparing to knock out a wall and add a family room. "Danny," Skeeter said in a Bawlamer accent as thick as King Syrup, "I know it's hard to see right now, but when we're done, you're gonna be able to look 40 feet across this room with no obscurities in your way."
Right. The fewer obscurities the better.
I fully support obscurity reduction -- that is, the removal of something abstruse or hard to understand.
And that's why I'd be happy to buy a raffle ticket to the Lower Jones Falls Expressway Implosion Party. This overhead highway -- at least the final stretch that creates a dead zone through the immediate east side of Baltimore, cutting it off from the city's core -- needs to go.
The point was made yesterday in the Johns Hopkins Downtown Center, during a forum sponsored by the Baltimore Architecture Foundation, that Baltimore is happening again. All sorts of revival projects are under way, and the city has huge potential for population growth over the next decade. If you drive around, you'll see it. The old housing projects have been replaced with new communities. The Johns Hopkins institutions continue to grow at a robust pace. Some long stretches of the east side are still overwhelmed with problems, but in the wide urban valley along the JFX, the visionaries see opportunity to create a boulevard that serves commuters while creating a friendlier environment for city life.
