“People don’t really see Baltimore as a Chesapeake city. The mouth of the Patapsco forms Baltimore Harbor before emptying into the bay, and the city’s Inner Harbor, the faded jewel of its downtown rebirth at Harborplace, is the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco. Reimagine Middle Branch, an outgrowth of the city’s 2015 South Baltimore Gateway Master Plan, is a $175 million effort to redevelop 19 neighborhoods along one of the Chesapeake Bay’s most neglected shorelines, the 11-mile Middle Branch of the Patapsco River. From there, Rogers has a meeting scheduled at the offices of Cherry Hill Strong, a community development nonprofit, to talk about food deserts.
With Brett Berkley, his environmental consultant, beside him in the front seat of his well-worn Toyota Camry, Rogers is heading for a big empty parking lot next to Medstar Harbor Hospital in the Cherry Hill neighborhood, so that he and Berkley can brainstorm about the project that’s consuming them: Reimagine Middle Branch. Harm City: Fourth in a series about environmental justice and climate adaptation in Baltimore’s neighborhoods.īrad Rogers, the maestro of Middle Branch, drives over the Hanover Street Bridge that crosses the Patapsco River in South Baltimore, talking with enthusiasm, his head filled with big ideas about the best ways to reinvent the city.
