While Byron is having his therapy I often got to the local YMCA to work out in the gym. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the neighborhood I drive through to get to the YMCA is one of the most economically diverse places I have ever been to in my life. Baltimore is s a wonderful city with lots of development projects that are beautifying the city. The waterfront area and downtown business districts look like any thriving city. But where Kennedy Krieger is located actually reminds me of Belfast in the early 80s. You could drive through neighborhood after neighborhood where so many bombs had hit, that entire blocks were deserted. You could still see the curtains, the wallpaper and remnants of normal life through the broken windows. It’s exactly the same thing here. The buildings are perfectly intact, no graffiti, some still have curtains in the windows, yet there are no people in them It’s like everyone just vanished and short of anything else to do, the building were just boarded or bricked up. Here is the multi-million dollar complex I am sitting somewhere in now:
The following shots were taken just a block and a half away in the surrounding neighborhood. With few exceptions, these buildings are completely uninhabited.
This is the abandoned historic school I mentioned in the earlier post.
“Where have all the flowers gone…. Long time passing. When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn.” That song was going round and round my mind as I was driving through this neighborhood. Where have all the people gone? Why did they leave? Was it a quick or a slow exodus? I’m sure it’s a complicated answer but I will have to ask around because I really really want to know.
Is it me or do all the building look like they're leaning? Could it be that the buildings are sinking and that's why they had to be abandoned?
ReplyDeleteJust found this in the Hopkins Magazine -University Biotech Park to Fight Blight After months of behind-the-scenes discussions, Baltimore City officials are moving forward with an ambitious plan that would transform a blighted neighborhood bordering the Johns Hopkins Hospital into biotech research space and as many as 1,500 new or rebuilt homes. Mayor Martin O'Malley's proposal calls for rebuilding an 80-acre swath which, despite sitting in the shadow of the nation's preeminent medical complex, has been devastated by poverty and drug abuse. In all, the project calls for $200 million in public-sector investment from federal, state, and city sources, and hundreds of millions of dollars more from private investors. The redevelopment centers on a proposed East Baltimore Research Park planned for 22 acres -- about a quarter of the overall site -- directly north of Hopkins Hospital.
ReplyDeletemore: Baltimore City currently has about 14,000 abandoned houses and more than 12,000 vacant lots, and nearly one-third of its industrial land is under-utilized (Hager 2002). A recent nationwide survey found that Baltimore City has one of the highest vacancy to population ratios: 22.22 abandoned structures per 1000 residents compared to an average of 2.63 per 1000 across all of the cities surveyed (Pagano and Bowman 2000). Baltimore City’s main problem seems to be the high number and widespread nature of its vacant structures
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