Boston Street designed with resident input.

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A mile from Baltimore's famous Inner Harbor, factory sites of a former industrial area along Boston Street became an attractive place to live work and play. In this area, City design consultants, Baltimore City planners and Public Works Engineers used citizen input to direct a roadway improvement project that's paving the way for growth in a popular residential and commercial neighborhood.

The catalyst of Baltimore's latest waterfront success story, the reconstructed Boston Street attracts new residents and businesses to join long-term property owners while serving the city with an improved east-west inner-city roadway along the Patapsco River.

While Boston Street was once an industrial-area shortcut between the neighborhood known as Canton and Interstate-95, it is now a fully landscaped boulevard complete with masonry medians, brick sidewalks and intersections that safely accommodate vehicles, pedestrians and wheelchairs.

As former waterfront factories were turned into apartments and condominiums, the City of Baltimore recreated Boston Street itself so that a major arterial transportation link would enhance the revitalized industrial neighborhood.

During the time of Interstate Highway building in the 50's and 60's, some transportation planners felt that Boston Street would one day become a high-speed elevated highway to connect the south end of Interstate 83 (Jones Falls Expressway) to the tunnels of I-895 and I-95 in eastern Canton. But as industrial Canton faded, ideas about sacrificing neighborhoods for interstate transportation were pushed from favor by neighborhood activism and other urban goals evolved. As it became clear that a high-speed elevated highway through this neighborhood would be inappropriate, development east from the Inner Harbor moved into waterfront factories along Boston Street, creating a desirable residential area that has become another Baltimore asset.

When planners and consulting engineers met with residents of the Boston Street corridor, informational meetings grew into community exchange meetings, which provided designers with citizen ideas and preferences that directed the design process for reconstruction of the Boston Street roadway.

"The things people said about their neighborhood made sense, and we found ways to incorporate neighborhood preferences," said George Balog, Baltimore's Director of Public Works.

"This roadway had been a truckers' shortcut through an industrial section, and as the area changed, we integrated traffic calming techniques and modified our ideas creating a Boston Street residential/commercial roadway that's not a barrier between a great neighborhood and its waterfront."

The Century Engineering, Inc./Buchart-Horn, Inc. joint venture team developed a context-sensitive design that kept engineering in touch with the environment of the community as well as citizen perception of the neighborhood they were helping recreate.

Even after the high-speed, elevated roadway concept had been scrapped, plans for a six-lane ground-level roadway were further modified to incorporate neighborhood preference for only four lanes with another lane for on-street parking.

The result is a four-lane waterfront boulevard with on-street parking and design features that enable residents and visitors to safely enjoy the waterfront. Wheelchair-accessible intersections have curbs extended into the roadway to calm traffic and protect pedestrians.

The $15 million project was completed in the summer of 1998.