As anyone who has ever walked the Inner Harbor promenade knows, the north shoreline is all hardscape. Which is to say, it's all bricks and concrete. By contrast, most of the new plans for the Middle Branch will keep it green and park like. The Westport development that Pat Turner is working on, for example, will replenish the shoreline, adding new wetlands and biofilters. The National Aquarium has plans to do the same at its forthcoming learning center.
Sun photo by Kathryn Whitney shows Delegate Brian McHale and Governor O'Malley surrounded by schoolchildren at yesterday's environmental center groundbreaking.
Standing in the way of all this greening is the sorry environmental legacy of heavy industry in that part of the city. Remediating a brownfield is not cheap nor easy. Case in point: to kick off Earth Week, yesterday the Mayor and Governor broke ground on a multi-million dollar environmental education center on the shoreline near Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. But first, according to today's Baltimore Sun, this had to happen:
"The cleanup of 22 acres of shoreline along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River - one of the most contaminated areas in the city's harbor - has led to recovery by the Maryland Port Administration of 30,000 tons of trash, roughly the same weight as 4,000 buses, including timber, concrete, pollutant-containing electrical equipment, more than two dozen shipwrecks and nearly 200,000 gallons of petroleum-tainted water. Some of the debris dates to the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904."
-m.e.
