An early morning stroll at City Dock
I’ll bet you’re one of those people who has vowed never to go to downtown Annapolis again. It’s just too crowded and there are never enough parking spaces. Well, hah! I just spent a couple of hours strolling around City Dock and there were just a few people around and acres of free parking. Of course, I was there at 8 o’clock in the morning, but that’s the secret magic time to go.
It was 10 degrees cooler than later in the day. Each morning, the sun rises over Kent Island and beams down the mouth of the Severn River, turning Annapolis Harbor into a sea of shimmering silver, silhouetting the sailboats in the mooring field.
Millie and I took our pick of hundreds of empty parking spaces and began our morning stroll. Our first stop was to inspect a tall ship tied up to the pier at the end of Prince George Street. This long dock has recently been acquired by the city, and the Annapolis harbormaster rents space to nonprofit vessels that promote educational, historical or heritage pursuits. The ship’s deck was swarming with kids, and I knew by the rigging that it must be the schooner Sultana.
The original Sultana was a merchant vessel built in Boston in 1767. It was the smallest schooner ever commissioned in the British Royal Navy. The Sultana here at the dock is a reproduction built in Chestertown in 2001 by the Sultana Education Foundation. She sails as a school ship, taking more than 4,500 students out onto the Chesapeake Bay each year for hands-on programs in environmental science and history.
Millie and I sat on a shady bench at the end of Prince George Street, and I finished my coffee while Millie flirted with a couple of young women on a morning walk. Next to the park there’s a small gray wood-framed building that looks out of place in redbrick Annapolis. This is the Burtis House, the sole-surviving waterman’s home located on City Dock. Cap’n William H. Burtis worked the water and rented boats from this pier.
From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, City Dock was known as “Hell Point.” The houses along it were mainly two-story frame dwellings like the Burtis House. This was a neighborhood of working-class families whose livelihoods depended upon one of the industries along the waterfront: the coal and lumber yards, sawmills, oyster-packing houses, warehouses, steamboat wharves and boat houses.
In 1941, the Naval Academy expanded, annexing the properties north of Prince George Street and condemning the existing residential and commercial buildings there. Curiously, one of the streets that disappeared in the annexation was called Holland Street. The athletic field house with its distinctive oversized Quonset-hut-shaped copper roof was completed in 1957.
The Burtis House is all that remains of the Hell
Point era in the maritime heritage of Annapolis, except for the house at the far end of the block on the corner of Craig Street. The Chesapeake Bay Office of the National Park Service is working with Preservation Maryland and the city to restore the Burtis House and raise it above the high tide line. That work is slated to be completed in the fall of 2024.
Once restored, the Burtis House might serve as one of the official Gateway welcome centers for the newly envisioned Chesapeake National Recreation Area; as an extension of the Annapolis Maritime Museum; or perhaps as the new headquarters for the Annapolis harbormaster.
Millie and I strolled around the brick-paved Susan Campbell Park at the end of City Dock. To debunk a common misconception, this is not “Susan B. Campbell Park” as in “Susan B. Anthony.” It’s named after the daughter of former Annapolis alderman and mayor pro tem Robert Campbell, an auctioneer by trade and a legendary character in his own right who lived nearby.
I looked back at the city skyline, which from this vantage point hasn’t changed all that much in 250 years, except for the State House dome, which is currently cocooned in shroud-wrapped scaffolding. It’s undergoing a $1.5 million restoration that will last another 2½ years.
The expanse of parking lot between the bricked park and the Market House will also be renovated to the tune of another $50 million. Work is scheduled to begin once the new Noah Hillman Garage is completed. The new City Dock park will have the same amount of green space as one and a half football fields. There will be three flexible plazas that can have around 60 parking spaces or be cleared of cars for events like the boat shows. While some parking will disappear, there will be about 200 spaces left, including the 50-car lot at 110 Compromise St.
The main goal of the plan is to raise City Dock above the high-tide line. Global warming has caused sea level rise and day-to-day nuisance flooding that has a negative economic impact. Nuisance flooding is when the tide rises high enough to disrupt daily activity. This is flooding that’s not necessarily associated with any storm, but caused by the direction of the wind, the phase of the moon, or the time of year and so it’s sometimes called “sunny-day flooding” or a “king tide.” In 2017, a study showed that Annapolis businesses suffered between $86,000 and $172,000 in lost business that year due to nuisance flooding at City Dock.
In 2017, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that Annapolis experiences the greatest increase in average annual nuisance flooding of any U.S. city. While there were only 3.8 days of nuisance flooding from 1957-1963, there were 39.3 days of floods between 2007 and 2013, a whopping 925% increase. It’s only getting worse. The Union of Concerned Scientists predicted that Annapolis will experience as many as 200 annual flood days by 2030 and 350 annual flood days by 2040. This past November, City Dock floodwaters were shin deep and kayakers paddled past the restaurants on Dock Street.
Yet on this day, the tide was at its normal level, the sun was in the sky, and all was well at City Dock. Millie and I strolled past a coffee klatch of a halfdozen seasoned gentlemen sitting in the shade of the trees and solving the problems of the world. A lone cyclist zipped past, and a jogger or two. A local dad had brought his grown-up son visiting from California to see the harbor. The son confessed he needed a “doggy fix” and asked if he could say hello to Millie. I readily agreed and Millie happily succumbed to a heartfelt hug and a scrub behind the ears.
Annapolis is a great town for walkers, and I met one of the most devoted just then — my friend Tom Mullen from across the harbor in Eastport. Tom walks 5 miles a day, six days a week, though in the summer he gives himself a break and only walks five days a week. Still, you’ll see him in his red T-shirt and baseball cap all around town. We posed for a photograph, then Tom strode off on the rest of his walk while Millie and I headed for home. It was almost 10 o’clock, the hour that the parking meters must be fed.
ANNAPOLIS CITY DOCK
Free parking until 10 a.m. Toilet facilities available in the harbormaster’s building