BURIED 1962
EVERYONE WHO DRIVES INTO Baltimore is shocked to discover that the interstate—a part of I-83 known as the JFX—stops dead and disappears in the middle of town. Whether you are coming from the north or the south, your route into the city will dump you off near the Inner Harbor and leave you to wend your way through downtown traffic. Before the JFX vanishes, it wanders through town like a drunk, swerving drastically left, then right, for no apparent reason.
But there is a reason. This road is built right on top of the Jones Falls, which once burbled through town to the bay, a “belligerent stream” according to early twentieth-century historian Letitia Stockett, who taught at the high school my daughter now attends. Perhaps because it was always prone to flooding and filled with trash, few mourned in the 1960s when the tough little waterway was paved over, sacrificed to suburbanites’ need for speed. The alternative was tearing down buildings and slicing through neighborhoods. On the other hand, if they had finished the road as planned, the Inner Harbor would now be covered with concrete ramps. A terrible thought indeed. Though it didn’t look like much back then, the decaying port has since become the city’s sparkly little Disneyland; all of Baltimore most tourists ever see.
Meanwhile, the belligerent stream has never submitted entirely, as I learned recently while reading a novel set in Baltimore with a secret waterfall. I immediately emailed the author: Where is this? In the abandoned industrial neighborhood beneath the elevated part of the highway, he wrote back, look for an overgrown trail. Once we found it, my daughter had to help me down the steep makeshift steps to the rickety deck. And there it was: the surprisingly emerald waters of the Jones Falls, bursting out of the culvert, rushing to a rounded cliff, tumbling over and pounding noisily into a pool. Graffiti adds a caption to the postcard: PERSISTENCE IS KEY.