Teardown in Edgewood: Old Army buildings to be replaced by new housing

(Baltimore Sun) - Harford County officials will gather in Edgewood on Thursday for a groundbreaking, an event they could more accurately call a ground-shaking. Washington Court, whose 51 boarded-up brick buildings date to the 1940s and once housed Army officers, will be razed to make way for a residential complex that should prove attractive to the influx of new residents arriving as part of the Base Realignment and Closure process. Continued

Photo: It was a simpler time, when good country folk made poison gas for a living. (Library of Congress)

Bringing the Train on Down the Line in Western Cecil County

(WoCCP) - The Oxford Area Transit Service, a nonprofit group, is working to restore rail service between Philadelphia and Perryville on the old Philadelpphia and Baltimore Central Railroad, which once served towns and villages in northwestern Cecil County. The public transportation advocates say that “with the influx of people connected to BRAC” this move would provide a much needed transportation enhancement, the Cecil Whig reported in a story earlier this week. Continued

Photos: PRR Octoraro Line, various cameras

“After all, who doesn’t enjoy walking around parking lots?”

This is not a park

(Examiner) - The arrival of 19,000 new residents by 2015 because of the expansion of Aberdeen Proving Ground could change the physical landscape of Harford.
A work group proposed several changes to update Harford’s 20-year-old development regulations, but smart-growth advocates said the suggestions will make the county too dense, less rural and far more friendly to developers than residents.
“We would have a jumbled mess that would minimize everyone’s quality of life, from urban dwellers to the rural residents,” said Morita Bruce, a Friends of Harford board member and organizer of communityresponsetothe zoningcode.com. Continued

An important message from the Harford County Economic Development Director

"We’re not at the end of a dirt road with a banjo playing."
Link

E-Mail Claims Harford Co. Has 'KKK, 3-Headed Deer'

BEL AIR, MARYLAND (WBAL) - Thousands of military employees are being told lies via e-mail that Harford County has three-headed deer, tainted organic milk and that the KKK runs rampant.
The letter is apparently targeted at people currently in New Jersey who are expected to move to the area under the Base Realignment and Closure Program. The e-mail was uncovered after a county leader received one in his e-mail inbox, county officials said. Continued

Historians hopeful about preserving proving ground’s bomb infested dirt

(Examiner) - A backhoe bit into a building last week at Aberdeen Proving Ground that had stood since World War II, clearing the way for construction projects that will reshape the look and mission of the base over the next few years.
As the Army at APG undertakes its biggest expansion since that war as the result of the federal Base Realignment and Closure process, engineers have cautioned that moving roads, tearing down old buildings and creating new ones could disrupt artifacts and archaeological sites ranging back to the earliest European settlement of northern Maryland.
But some historians argue the area’s history is safer in the hands of the military. Continued

The oldest house in Harford County, "Maxwell's Conclusion" was built on Gunpowder Neck in the 18th century and burned down by the Army in the 20th.

Chronicling Route 40

(Matthew Santoni, Baltimore Examiner) - Boom times may return to Route 40 north of Baltimore. But the crumbling relics — the former Magnolia diner that’s now the office for a junkyard, the Keyser Motel so often cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape, the old Flying Clipper restaurant that became a liquor store — may be among the casualties of progress.
As developers eye the run-down car lots, rent-by-the-hour motels and porno palaces along Route 40 as ripe for redevelopment opportunities, photographer Michael Lijewski rushes to document the area’s hidden history before it disappears.
“It’s a place that most people consider worthless, but the history there ranges from the obvious vintage motels and motor courts to the Colonial era,” says Lijewski, creator of the local history blog Falmanac. “Route 40 is our Route 66.” Continued

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

BRAC: Who's safeguarding our history?

"Upgrades and expansion will bring minor or temporary increases in noise and air pollution, possible long-term degradation of wetlands and the potential loss of historic structures ranging from World War II to the earliest days of Harford County's settlement, the impact study said." - Baltimore Examiner

The oldest house in Harford County, "Maxwell's Conclusion" was built on Gunpowder Neck in the 18th century and burned down by the Army in the 20th.

Our descendants will despise us for having thrown away the best of our culture. - Alan Lomax

More neon please

See those holes in the top sign? That's where the neon tubing used to go. There aren't many vintage neon signs illuminating Route 40 in Harford County, Maryland anymore. Not many left in the entire region.
Now look at the bottom sign, it's from the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. It's beautiful. The owners of the Blue Swallow, like the owners of most vintage motels, couldn't afford to restore their aging signage on their own, they had some help from the New Mexico Route 66 Association. The association, using a government grant, started a "neon restoration project" for the famous old highway. Consequently, Route 66 is a much more interesting place to look at than Route 40.
Places don't become desirable destinations on their own; it takes imagination, effort, and money. It seems like preservation and restoration always come last around here. There's never enough money for museums, or art, or parks. And yet there always seems to be cash enough to build money losing stadiums for rich people, or new development handouts for the petit bourgeoisie.
Is it any wonder that people are filing lawsuits to keep from moving here? What have we ever done to make this place more livable, more interesting?

Photos: various Canon dSLR's

Come back Evelyn, we need you!

Our family has had a lot of interesting friends over the decades, but none quite so interesting as Evelyn. My mom & her sisters met Evelyn while working in the Pentagon during World War Two. Evelyn owned a car and they pooled to work in order to qualify for gas ration stamps. She had a Ford coup that her father had modified to allow for more passengers. Evelyn had left her parents on the farm in Missouri, but they followed her to Washington, which cramped her style somewhat, but she was a good daughter and set them up in a nice house (safely) in the suburbs.
Evelyn was smart, witty, and competitive to a fault; her friends would let her win at golf, just to keep the peace. She loved all sports, had season tickets for the Redskins, and enjoyed stock-car races too; she liked to stand by the curve and let the racing soot waft over her.
She was gutsy and just a bit outrageous. After the war she bought an army surplus jeep, in order to fend off bad D.C. drivers; she didn't care if anybody hit her or not - if she had the right of way, she just kept on going.
Late in life, she suffered a stroke and was confined to a nursing home. But her mind was still sharp and she was still feisty; when the attendants proved to be a lazy bunch, she bought a police scanner to monitor the home's activities. They took it away from her, she hired a lawyer and got it back.
Evelyn stayed on with the Pentagon and eventually became big in what we now call "base realignment and closure" or BRAC for short. I heard that the officials didn't like being told what to do by a woman, but Evelyn was all business and just kept getting promoted higher and higher. The generals didn't get in her way, neither did politics, she did what was best for the army. It's said that she won all the highest awards they can give to a civilian.
Today, the latest BRAC plan seems to be turning into a real fiasco. New Jersey and its workers at Fort Monmouth are outraged and have gotten the federal government to review the thing. Harford County seems ill prepared at best & the fact that they're building on a sinking peninsula isn't inspiring much confidence either. The area around Patuxent Naval Air Station is still reeling from the last BRAC (years ago), and the plans for BRAC in Virginia have just been changed. Changed? That's not supposed to happen. How did this thing go so wrong?
It wasn't like that when Evelyn was closing bases. But she's gone now, and anyway, she wouldn't have been welcome in today's political climate. Not only was she non-partisan, she was what they called back then, an "old maid." I'm sure somebody would have asked or told by now. What that has to do with competence is beyond me, but we sure could use a little competence these days.

Evelyn (left) & friend, 1949.

Global warming & the Chesapeake Bay

Buying a place on the Shore? You may wanna look at these maps first, they show what the Chesapeake Bay's coastline might look like if sea levels should increase. Of course, this is all long term stuff, it doesn't really matter unless you were building something big - a military base for example. I say we change the name to Base Realignment And Closure In Submerged Harford or BRACISH. To play with the maps in real time click here.

Update: A report released today by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation states that Maryland's coast is actually sinking, making it more vulnerable to raising sea levels than most other places. 'The report emphasized that the sea level rise is already evident. "The fact that we're losing a lot of our bay islands -- Smith Island, Poplar Island. Black Water National Wildlife Refuge has literally lost thousands of acres of marshland," McGee said.' Read more here.

Before the Flood: What to save from BRAC

When I was a kid we used to visit relatives in Rockville; it was a long, long, drive, and not just because we didn't like them, but because we had to travel through Columbia, Maryland. It was the dullest place in the world. There wasn't any variety there. It was just mile after mile of brand new tract-housing. No stores, no industry, no railroads, no farms, nothing decrepit, nothing historical, not even any people - just houses.

It's my fear that Route 40 (East) will look that way soon: nothing old & nothing interesting. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who think everything older than myself is historic, or that everything historic is worth preserving, but I do believe we should think about keeping a few things around. And not just for the sake of history, but also for the sake of aesthetic balance. This is where words like "livable" come into play, not to mention terms like "pleasant," and "interesting." When everything is new it can be hard on the eyes and a drag on the soul. (The same goes for incessant antiquity - parts of England come to mind.) We need balance.

Is the Vagabond Motel worth preserving? Probably not, but the sign is nice, perhaps we could keep that. How about the Regal Inn, it's one of the prettier motels along Route 40, maybe we could keep that building around? And honestly now, how many of us locals haven't spent some, er, "vacation time" at one of Pulaski Highway's many fine, uh, "resort destinations?" Wouldn't it be nice to have something to remember your friskier years by?

Still not convinced? How about Sophia's Dairy, it is reputed to be one of the finest colonial era buildings in the nation. Would you rather it be a mini-storage warehouse, or a Starbucks? We need to think about these things now; already the local developers are lined up, licking their chops, and demanding carte blanche. They'll probably get it too.

Photos: Canon EOS 30D ©falmanac

Blog tracks BRAC attack

I thought I was the only local writing about BRAC, but there's an entire blog devoted to the subject here. And unlike Falmanac, it's all BRAC all the time. It is also informative, chock full of resources, and does not appear to be run by crazy/ranty people. Highly recommended.

Photo ©2006 falmanac (Canon 5D)

"What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?"

While it's true that we make our own lives, it's harder to make an interesting life in some places than it is in others.
I remember talking to a man in the cable TV industry who compared selling cable in the Albuquerque region to selling it in the Baltimore area. "Albuquerque was a tough sell," he said, "but Baltimore was easy." I asked him why. "Because there's so many other things to do in Albuquerque."
I've lived in both places and he's right. Plenty to do there, not much to do here. Why is that? No, never mind, I don't care why. The better question is: Will it ever get any better?
My only hope for the region is BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) which has, for some sadistic reason, thousands of people moving to suburban Baltimore from points north, most of them within a few minutes ride of NYC. Think they'll like Harford County? I don't think so either.
In a recent Sun article, a man from a company relocating here was absolutely dumbfounded by the lack of decent restaurants showing up on his GPS. Well, I got news for you buddy, it wasn't a mapping error.
A couple of years back, I ran into a childhood friend who'd become a chef and opened an outstanding eatery in Harford County. He spoke to me of his frustration over regional tastes. He'd entered a dish in a local restaurant competition and been beaten out by "cheesy fries." Sadly, and inevitably, his outstanding eatery became a sports bar.
And that's just food. There ain't many other activities here either: cultural, recreational, shopping, educational - it's all pretty bleak.
One can eke out a sort of half-assed recreational life in Harford County, but it isn't easy. My hobbies these days include this blog, where I take pictures of old buildings that are on the verge of becoming parking lots. I have leveraged the great vacuity of the place into a kind of sad art. It's not much, but it gives me something to do.
You BRAC folks have a tough job ahead of you. You will be like pioneers homesteading on an empty plain. What will win out in the end: culture, or emptiness? The odds aren't at all clear.

A new life awaits in Harford County!

Dembytown

"In 1917 Harford's decades of sunny, prosperous, and seemingly unending tranquility were abruptly interrupted by America's entry into World War I. Many Countians volunteered for and saw service in Europe during the conflict, it seems arguable that the greatest affect the Great War had on Harford came in October 1917, when the federal government condemned the entire Gunpowder and Bush river necks -35,211 acres of land and 34,000 acres covered by water or about 60 square miles in all. Heretofore, as historian Keir Stirling has written, these stretches of southern Harford County "were locally known as the 'Garden of Eden,' where an excellent grade of shoe peg corn had been grown for many years. Many area farmers were able to produce 125 bushels of corn to the acre. The Baker family and others engaged in the profitable canning industry were producing about 300,000 cases of shoe peg corn and tomatoes worth approximately $1.5 million annually by 1917 .... The famous Poole's Island peaches were ... were canned locally and considered to be of high quality. Local fishing was another industry worth $700,000 a year."
Overnight all this changed as everyone living on those bay-front lands had to move to make way for the poison-gas testing facilities Washington felt the war demanded. The former landowners - the Cadwaladers, Bakers, Mitchells, and others - received some payment from the government for their lost acres and many of them then purchased other farms and resumed their lives. The workers, generally black tenant farmers, received nothing and were forced to move from the source of their livelihoods. Many such displaced families, including the Dembys and Gilberts, settled in a stretch of land near Magnolia; the houses, church, and school they built created the community now called Dembytown (HA-1603, HA-1604)." From the 1998 Historical Preservation Element.

Mitchell's Shoe Peg Corn

Once upon a time, around the turn of the 20th century, Harford County, Maryland led the nation in commercial canning. The industry centered around Perryman (aka Perrymansville) and Aberdeen. Numerous fortunes were made under various brands, but only one remains today: Mitchell's Shoe Peg Corn. And even that brand is now canned under the auspices of Hanover Foods of Hanover, Pennsylvania, though still quite tasty regardless. Like so much local history, a lot of the area was annexed by the federal government to build Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground. Indeed most of the county's earliest structures came under the care of the army which later reported that the historic buildings "blowed up real good." Sigh.