Urbanite Project!
TEAM 1: Gabriel Kroiz and Eliza Steinmeier
An award-winning designer and preservationist, Gabriel Kroiz has more than fifteen years of experience as an architect, builder, and educator. In 2008, Kroiz joined the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University as the undergraduate program director and is working to achieve the school’s missions of providing access to the design professions for African Americans and performing research focused on the sustainable redevelopment of Baltimore and the surrounding region.
Baltimore native Eliza Steinmeier has devoted her professional life to working in, teaching about, and defending the marine environment. After graduating from UCLA School of Law, she worked on Santa Monica Baykeeper’s landmark sewage case against the city of Los Angeles, which has resulted in significant improvements in the health of the Santa Monica Bay. In 2004, Steinmeier founded the Magdalena Baykeeper in Baja California Sur in Mexico. She has been the executive director and waterkeeper for Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper since 2007.
photo by Lisa Van Horn
Divining Baltimore: A Visioning Exercise
Structural Challenges & Opportunities
Additional Links
Although this vision could be realized, it is important to recognize the challenges of actual implementation. Below Central Avenue is a maze of utilities that would have to be relocated or reengineered to avoid the waterway. This is by no means a simple task. Additionally, the current Central Avenue storm drainpipe conveys a significant amount of rainwater to the harbor. The sheer volume of the water, and the speed by which it travels during a rainstorm, would rip apart a natural stream. Therefore, the water would have to be collected in an upstream pond and released in a controlled fashion.
Despite the challenges, however, Central Avenue, and its underground storm drain, are collapsing. Therefore, the entire system needs to be rebuilt anyway. The question now is how?
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A Letter From Chris Streb of BioHabitats:
Depth
The first consideration is depth to the pipe. For lots of urban stream valleys, this is where daylighting becomes impossible quick. Often culverts are 20 to 30 feet down, and the valley has been filled in. The good news here is that depth shouldn’t be an issue. Central Avenue is probably only 5 to 10 feet above the water level, which means the culvert is pretty readily accessible. The shallower the depth to bottom of pipe invert, the flatter your side slopes and need for retaining walls.
Width
This one is a bit more difficult to say without some deeper analysis. Width is going to be a function of drainage area. The smaller the drainage area, the less width you will need for conveying baseflows and stormflows. But even for the smallest perennial stream, I’d say 30 feet is going to be too narrow. Assume the stream is 10 feet below. 1:1 side slopes would consume 10 feet for each side of the stream bank. Moreover, such steepness will make it look like an open sewer. Now maybe there are games you can play, where you only express a base flow channel and you pump the water up a little higher and let stormflows pass through a pipe. I think this is somewhat like the Seoul, South Korea, daylighting project that Urbanite featured. That project might even be kind of Disney World if I recall, where they actually recirculate the flows.
So to tell you the required width, we need to know drainage area (to know the width of the creek) and the depth to the culvert invert below the pavement. My hunch is that 50 to 60 feet is closer to the mark. This would create a more functional greenway as well. Ecologically, aesthetically, recreationally, and, really, spiritually.
Utilities
This will be the uglier side of the analysis and expensive. There is sewer, gas, fiber optic, water, steam?, storm drains, etc. Again, the depth of these is the key, but I’d say most are closer to the surface than the storm culvert. This means each of them will require going over or under the daylit stream. You will need bridges at Fayette, Baltimore, Lombard, Eastern, Pratt, etc. I suppose the utilities could be strapped to the bottom of these bridges. All of this is technically feasible, but costly.
So in conclusion, I think the concept of daylighting Central Run is technically feasible but so expensive that it may not be economically feasible. It would be an important north-south greenway that could completely revitalize that corridor and possibly generate some interest in those neighborhoods.