In the 1940s, then-Baltimore Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr. warned against the city’s enlargement of what was then Gwynns Falls Park in West Baltimore.
He described what we know today as Leakin Park as inaccessible, underutilized and unknown to many city residents.
The city acquired the additional land and now approximately 1,000 acres of natural valley, streams and paths remain much as the former mayor characterized it.
The park gets a bad reputation for the bodies dropped in its leafy interior. The podcast “Serial” gave the park a national reputation, and not the kind anyone would be proud of. A woman last fall was walking in the park and was dragged to a stream bank and assaulted.
It’s not surprising that in the 1960s, interstate highway planners wanted to use this lightly used parkland as an extension of Interstate 70 into downtown Baltimore.
A remarkable coalition of tough neighborhood fighters formed a group called VOLPE, Volunteers Opposed to the Leakin Park Expressway. Their name was a parody of the Republican federal transportation Secretary John A. Volpe, a proponent of the Interstate Highway System. Volpe also owned a construction business and was part of former President Richard Nixon’s cabinet.
This band of Black and white neighborhood activists from Rosemont, Forest Park, Dickeyville, Windsor Hills and Fairmount prevailed. Their victory meant the interstate, I-70, stopped at Woodlawn at the western edge of the city line. Another branch picks up at the Highway to Nowhere in West Baltimore.
The park and its adjacent neighborhoods largely survived, although many Rosemont homeowners lost their residences.
Gwynns Falls and Leakin parks (there’s a seamless connection between these two greenswards) stymied the highway builders 50-plus years ago. And, to the parks’ credit, they have tested the power of the city government to tame and organize them or police them or, as D’Alesandro forecast, to make the lands accessible to numbers of city residents.
More than 20 years ago a deliberate effort was made to open up the parkland. The result was the Gwynns Falls Trail. It is signed and marked, with parking areas, along a meandering paved path. For those who use it, the trail affords a natural experience in the heart of a big city. It’s leafy and quiet. There are well-designed pedestrian bridges over the streams. While it’s popular with some bicyclists, it is not as well used as it could be.
On a recent sunny weekday afternoon, there were but two cyclists at Winan’s Meadow, off Franklintown Road.
Why is Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park off-putting? It’s overgrown by invasive vegetation. Illegal trash dumpers use its hidden byways.
Baltimore City workers attempt to keep up with its demands.
The accessibility and utilization issues remain. Once the road war was won, the road fighters assumed a new, more gentle role, the Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park.
And now, these park advocates are saying it’s time to consider another option: Allow the State of Maryland and its Department of Natural Resources to assume responsibility for all of this land. It’s time for full-time, dedicated park rangers at Leakin, a staffed visitor site, proper signage, vast trail maintenance and decent restrooms.
“The old accessibility and underuse issues remain true today, and that’s why we’re pushing for the state to invest in the park as the only permanent solution to its challenges,” said Michael “Mike” Cross-Barnet, who is Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park’s executive director. “There are days when under 50 persons use the park. This is outrageous.”
“The park is a very special place, a unique environment with unique challenges requiring a unique solution,” said Cross-Barnet, a former Baltimore Sun editor and Reservoir Hill resident.
The Friends group, funded in part by the Abell and Goldseker foundations, has been leading an effort to bring these hillsides and meadows under better control. The group initiated the city/state partnership concept a year ago.
The park has its advocates. Ela-Sita Carpenter is an expert on bats whose childhood visits to the park inspired her to become a wildlife biologist. She now works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her late father, Antonio Carpenter, was a Friends board member, naturalist, and champion for the park.
He rescued a magnolia grove from choking vines and helped create the park’s labyrinth. Her mother, Brenda Pinkney, is a current board member for the group and steward of the labyrinth and surrounding area.
Individuals are trying, but the park’s 1,000 acres are bigger than good intentions and individual efforts.
Various city and state officials and other interested parties are considering the idea of Gwynns Falls and Leakin becoming a full-fledged state park under city ownership. It’s an idea that deserves thoughtful consideration.