About this Sacred Place
The East Baltimore Midway community is budding with all levels of diversity. Newly renovated and built homes have brought in people from various professions, especially those of the veterans community. The Boone Street Lot, once an urban farm, has contributed to an overall lack of sense of safety for nearby residents since its abandonment. Noting the lot’s potential and past history, O’Hara Development Partners CDC secured the site and generated a creative design concept based on the outcomes of several community meetings. The concept will resurface the former ability for children to play outside while neighbors keep an eye on them, while retaining elements of its former agricultural productivity. This will continue the activation of greenspace within the neighborhood begun by the revitalization of the Boone Street Commons, just across the street from the Boone Street Lot, also done by O’Hara Development Partners. Nature Sacred and O’Hara Development Partners’ collaboration on this site furthers O’Hara Development Partners’ goal of providing the community with a strong asset in the form of a green space as the neighborhood begins to recover from neglect and disinvestment.
Locate directly across the street from another O’Hara property, Boone Street Commons, this site is a counterpart and expansion of their work. Flanked on each side by trees, the two primary entrances to the site face the Commons, and meander for several feet through native plantings and lawn (that will become a play area in future phases) before emerging onto the central green of the site. On the north side of the site are a number of raised planters for community use; on the south side of the site is a line of fruit trees that remain from the initial use of the site. A storage container is set into the southeast corner of the site against a backdrop of native plantings. The unifying element in the final design is the rhomboid pathway that loops through the site.
Design Team
Heidi Thomas and Cherisse Otis, Nature Sacred Design Advisor, EnviroCollab
Tom Brokaw, architect, 7th Street LLC
