Some denied water access for reasons other than race
The Middle Branch Wetlands Project featured recently in The Baltimore Sun presents some worthy ideas, namely the restoration of waterfront amenities that will be accessible to the local communities (“A multimillion-dollar project to prevent South Baltimore flooding could help prove new strategies in climate resiliency,” Sept. 30). It is unfortunate, however, that the idea cannot be presented without descending into another race-based accusation of injustice.
The article emphasizes the quote by South Baltimore Gateway Partnership Executive Director Brad Rogers that the Black communities have been systematically denied the same access to the waterfront that is enjoyed by white communities. Allow me to share my experience of growing up white on the south shore of the Patapsco River. My earliest years were lived in the hamlet of Masonville. It was a white, working-class community located in what is now the large rail yard overpassed by the big steel bridge on the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel approach. The only access we had to the river was at Masonville Cove, where sand was being mined. When we went there, we were probably trespassing.
My father worked at the nearby Maryland Drydock Company, and my grandfather had worked at the nearby Weyerhauser facility. In 1952, the railroad had need to expand its rail yard, and Masonville happened to be in the way, so the hamlet was bulldozed and we all had to move away. There was nothing racial about it, we were just on the lower end of the economic ladder, and it probably didn’t make any sense to live in an area surrounded by heavy industry. Most of the community moved up to the Brooklyn neighborhood, which was also a working-class white community. At that time, the shoreline was lined with heavy industry from Fairfield to the intersection of Frankfurst Avenue and Hanover Street.
The state later built the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel and the approach for that facility ran along the south shore of the Patapsco and made water access for the white community of Brooklyn even more difficult, but it was not a race-based decision. The industry was there because that is where the river was, it had nothing to do with environmental justice.