Field Trip: Baltimore

I've been catching up on Gerald Neily's writing at Baltimore InnerSpace. Baltimore is a very strange and fascinating little city that continues to inspire me to this day. I'm amazed by Neily's fully developed ideas for transit and revitalization in Baltimore. He has a beautiful way of articulating greater visions of the city that could be realized through transit development. Take this description of a segment of his suggested extension of the proposed Charles Street Corridor Trolley.

Just south of 33rd Street is one of the city's select few truly monumental edifices, the Baltimore City College - also known as the "Castle on the Hill". This building truly represents Baltimore's fleeting brush with greatness as a world-class urban center. Baltimore City College is actually a high school, not a college. It's a high school that was referred to as a college, because when it was built in the 1920s, it was part of a lofty ambition to treat high school students as if they were college students.

While nowadays, the image of the Baltimore City school system gets constantly trashed by almost everyone, suffering an even worse reputation than the MTA, this magnificent building is a gigantic symbol of everything that this city could and once did aspire to - not just in education but in everything. Just compare the ambitions represented by this cathedral of learning to the school system's current educational goal of attempting to get the citywide high school drop-out rate below 60 percent. And even worse, Baltimoreans are often now literally scared out of their wits by city high school students marauding on MTA buses.

This is precisely the kind of visionary ambition necessary for transforming America's cities. He goes on to give a brief rundown of Baltimore's recent transit history, during which time "super grand visions" were inevitably scaled down to "modest little gestures" that missed countless opportunities. I think there's a lesson for LA in there.