Making Dead Buildings Live: the Steady Baltimore Museum Project

For three miles in Baltimore City, the road that leads to York, PA denies its namesake and is instead known as Greenmount Avenue. From its southern starting point on Monument Street just east of the city jail, Greenmount runs past Greenmount Cemetery, which is the final resting place of eight Maryland governors, seven Baltimore mayors, and transcendent American historical figures like Johns Hopkins, Enoch Pratt, and John Wilkes Booth.

If you drive or take the 8 bus down Greenmount from Towson and the city's northern reaches, where it is known as York Road, the cemetery seems to be another sort of morbid marker -- where the east side's main artery was so thoroughly severed that an entire section of Baltimore bled out. Windows that are boarded and in some cases cinderblocked shut recall the population hemorrhage of the late twentieth century, when a full third of Baltimore's urban residents moved away.

Nevertheless, near North Avenue -- another of Baltimore's great thoroughfares whose recent desolation confounds all urban planning logic -- committed members of the city's arts community are doing all they can to make Greenmount thrive again.

Steady Baltimore, a public artists' collective launched in 2006, is working to restore two rowhomes at North Ave. and Greenmount. Those edifices represent the real challenge of bringing life to the intersection and the adjacent neighborhood of Barclay. Steady Baltimore founder Adrian Akerman and art director Stefan Hauswald described the current state of each building and what they hope to achieve during a recent interview in the City Arts residences at Greenmount and Oliver Street.

"One of them is a fire burnout and the other is an abandoned shell," Akerman says matter-of-factly. He's talking about 426 and 428 E. North Avenue, but there are tens of thousands of such pairs around Baltimore. Because of Steady Baltimore's work to date, both units now have new roofs and sub-floors, and an upcoming "gut-out" day on February 5 will remove debris from a fire that was quenched but not followed by any sad homeowners' careful clearing, as might be expected in a residential area.

The fact is that despite generations of family occupancy, the last row of eight wide, three-story houses west of Greenmount all bear the same, wrong address of 468 East North Avenue in Google Maps. Their neighbors to the corner have been demolished completely, and the Internet Age hasn't even bothered to mark the remaining century-old homes as distinct properties that may be inhabited again.

Maybe Google is right. Maybe absentee landlords are right. Maybe the Baltimore City Fire Department is right to occasionally set such homes ablaze on purpose for training exercises. More likely, Steady Baltimore is right.

Akerman and Hauswald, both Baltimore natives, have secured grants for facade restoration and gratefully accepted pro bono architecture work from the Neighborhood Design Center in Southwest Baltimore. They are benefiting from the first overhaul of the Baltimore City Zoning Code since 1971, which will prioritize mixed-use developments like City Arts and the nearby Copy Cat Building, and initiatives led by MICA and urban-living advocates that are anchoring North Avenue at Howard Street, across Charles and St. Paul, and hopefully to Greenmount.

"Our aim is to promote public art in Baltimore," Hauswald says, describing the Steady Baltimore facility's planned gallery and community creativity space. The crew of artists has already completed murals at 27th and Greenmount, Carroll Park Skatepark in Pigtown, and the Skatepark of Baltimore in Hampden's Roosevelt Park. Steady Baltimore debuted its renovation plan for the North Avenue buildings with a community arts picnic at Mund Park, between 23rd and 24th and Greenmount, but the focus since then has been on getting grant money and building plans together, then starting work.

A youth lounge is included in a building plan intended to meet United States Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) specifications, as well as the new Baltimore City Green Building Standard (BCGBS), a part of the city's permitting process that became mandatory in September, 2010.

Having access to a space that is itself ultra-modern from a sustainability standpoint and also conducive to creativity will be a blessing for Steady Baltimore's anchor group United Sisters Mentoring, a program for young ladies, and for residents of the Barclay neighborhood, which in 2006 had a higher concentration of murder and gun violence than any other neighborhood in Baltimore.

In September, 2010, Barclay secured a financial lifeline from Telesis, an urban development corporation that committed $85 million to restore Barclay and the Old Goucher area to its west. Mixed-income housing and mixed-use zoning are becoming the rule for redevelopment in town, and more consideration is being given to bicycle access and public transportation routes.

As concepts become concrete, debris goes away in dumpsters, and these burnouts and shells become whole buildings again, it will likely still be years before Steady Baltimore's museum and art space is bustling. But Adrian Akerman was raised in Waverly, just up Greenmount, and he himself owns a renovation, roofing, and home improvement company. He has known this three-mile road of sadness and potential his whole life, and he knows how to turn plans into something real. He knows how to make dead buildings live.


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Photos:

- Steady Baltimore founder Adrian Akerman and art director Stefan Hauswald in the future home of the Greenmount Gallery artspace in Baltimore, MD - Photo by Arianne Teeple
- Akerman and Hauswald outside the future home of the Greenmount Gallery artspace in Baltimore, MD - Photo by Arianne Teeple
- A Steady Baltimore event - courtesy of Steady Baltimore
- The Steady Baltimore logo - courtesy of Steady Baltimore
- Akerman and Hauswald outside the future home of the Greenmount Gallery artspace in Baltimore, MD - Photo by Arianne Teeple
- The future home of the Greenmount Gallery space is in the Station North Arts and Entertainment district. - Photo by Arianne Teeple