Ask community leaders on either side of West Baltimore’s “Highway to Nowhere” about the idea of building a cap over a single block of the long trench dug out for the project 50 years ago, and they respond with a deep sigh, a shrug and sometimes an eye roll.

Their neighborhoods are on life support, they say, battered by decades of failed development strategies and desperately in need of assistance to become the safe, thriving, diverse, attractive places they have long dreamed of and long been promised.

“I don’t understand. Once the cap gets there, what’s going to happen? How is that supposed to help us? I’m not feeling this cap,” said Janet Allen, president of the Heritage Crossing Residents’ Association.

The one-block fill-in idea also confounds Sonia Eaddy, president of the Poppleton Now Community Association, whose neighborhood is west of Allen’s on the south side of the highway.

“They come to you with their plans that they have already pre-planned and then ask you for your ideas. But they don’t really want to know them,” Eaddy complained. “No, I don’t. I don’t like the cap.”

The project is a way to “heal the wound,” say local, state and federal officeholders, referring to the 1.5-mile-long roadway that displaced more than 1,500 people and destroyed 971 houses and 62 businesses in the 1970s.

Wound-healing was the politicians’ mantra last month when they announced that the outgoing Biden administration had approved an $85 million “Reconnecting Communities” grant, part of a $200-million Phase 1 plan.

The grant funds are to be used for “deconstructing” the highway’s overpasses that carry traffic over Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and for building that land bridge over the highway several blocks away, between Calhoun and Carey streets. Drawings show it topped with a grassy landscaped “civic space” and a possible future Red Line transit station.

Both Allen and Eaddy argue that, rather than engineer this land bridge, city leaders should direct investment toward the basic critical needs of communities like theirs that abut the canyon-like highway.

“The mayor has said he wants to pay reparations,” said Eaddy, whose home sits about 150 feet from the steep drop-off to the six-lane highway, also known as Route 40.

“We’re letting them know what reparations look like – and they don’t look like a cap.”

• PART 1: Plan to help West Baltimore heal from the “Highway to Nowhere” misses the mark, retired city planner says (2/10/25)

“Something beautiful and sustainable and with a mix of incomes, not just low-income,” said Allen, asked to imagine what she calls her community’s dream deferred.

“Some home ownership. Some shops or places to buy food. A pharmacy. A place where people can go – a community building,” she continued. “And jobs that people could walk to. Jobs that would make young college graduates want to stay and not move away to Howard County.”

With Heritage Crossing, where Allen has lived for 22 years, sitting at the intersection of MLK Boulevard and Franklin Street, the longtime community leader is fine with the idea of taking down the highway overpasses.

Right now they loom beside her community, attracting homeless encampments, as she sees it, while the current configuration of the road and MLK Boulevard encourage whizzing traffic and little else.

Her redevelopment dream could be realized along MLK Boulevard, perhaps as part of the overpass tear-down plan, Allen says, if only officials could commit to building a new community rather than filling in a nearby empty space.

“We have land at grade here, flat land. There’s no big ditch here, like it is to the west at Carey and Calhoun,” she said. “I’m hoping they can see the possibilities.”

“We can’t afford to wait”

Eaddy and Allen are part of the West Baltimore United (WBU) workgroup that the city Department of Transportation, in conjunction with the Maryland Department of Transportation, has been leading.

WBU held four meetings last year where “visioning” and “goal setting” tasks produced “key themes” that seem to mirror what Allen and Eaddy are after.

“Neighborhood revitalization and community restoration, economic development and commercial and retail growth, eliminating food deserts” were among the goals noted at a June 12 meeting.

The latest of these meetings is scheduled tomorrow (February 11) at 5:45 p.m. at the Bon Secours Community Resource Center at 31 South Payson Street, with the public “welcome to observe only.”

Allen is pinning her hopes on her memory of city transportation official Stuart Sirota saying at one meeting that the current plan for the use of that money is preliminary and could be altered.

But both women, veterans of earlier city-led engagement exercises, are skeptical.

“We have met about the Highway to Nowhere ad nauseam so many times over the years, and now we’re just ready to get some real development that’s going to be beneficial to the community,” Allen said.

Eaddy said residents are impatient with the protracted process.

“The city says they don’t have the money to invest in our community. Whoever they’re giving this money to – for research and designing and consulting – it’s not coming to us,” she said.

“We can’t afford to wait 5, 10, 20 years. We’re all asking, ‘What are you going to do for us now?’”

“A slap in the face”

There’s ample history behind this cynicism.

In Sonia Eddy’s Poppleton, it’s the story of how a New York company – given rights by the city in 2005 to redevelop a wide swath of her community – has managed to build two highly leveraged and poorly constructed apartment buildings after two decades of demolition and displacement.

Eaddy and other community leaders successfully fought to save her home and the historic Sarah Ann Street rowhouses from being taken through eminent domain, but they feel the city has ignored their subsequent efforts to steer Poppleton’s future.

After the city housing department canceled its land development agreement with La Cité developer Dan Bythewood and his apartment buildings were placed into a forced sale, community members thought they were rid of him.

As part of residents’ own planning process, Eaddy says, they have come up with plans, banks and developers to help them rebuild their community, now blighted with vacant lots and dilapidated buildings.

But Bythewood suddenly resurfacing at a Urban Design & Architecture Advisory Panel meeting last month, with plans for a new townhome and apartment complex project in Poppleton, exposed to Eaddy and her group that city officials had been quietly interacting with the developer for months.

“It was a slap in the face,” she said. “It made us angry that the city is engaging in this underhanded stuff.”

“Fewer services now”

As for Heritage Crossing, built on the site of the former Murphy Homes high-rise public housing project, Allen says the city has never helped the community evolve as it was promised.

A mix of 185 owner-occupied homes and 75 public housing units, the complex has the look of a picture postcard New England village, with tidy rowhouses facing inward toward a park with a red-roofed gazebo.

But it’s also a kind of oasis, sandwiched behind a brick wall and berm along MLK Boulevard and blocks of housing blighted with vacants and challenged by crime.

“We were told that we were going to be the gateway, the billboard that was going to attract other investors, homeowners and businesses into the community,” Allen said.

She recalls being told her community had a bright future, with the proposed Red Line, Howard Street “Superblock,” rehabbed State Center and other projects on the way.

“Now 22 years later, none of it was done,” she said. “There are no big developments happening in our community. I think we actually have even fewer services now.”

Allen says news of the $85 million federal grant has other West Baltimore neighborhoods feeling the way she does: “The natives are getting restless.”

“There has been like rumbling, you know. Everybody’s talking, and everybody is now wanting a piece of the pie because now it’s reality,” she said.

“Something is going to happen, but it needs to be the right thing –  a win-win for all of us because we all have dire needs.”