There are whispers below the streets of Baltimore.
The sources of the sounds have been buried for more than a century, but a local artist’s new public art installation is bringing them to the surface.
No, we’re not talking about zombies or some other undead supernatural creatures.
Artist Bruce Willen is highlighting Baltimore’s buried waterways in his new project titled “Ghost Rivers.”
“You walk along the street and catch these ghostly water sounds,” said Willen, who is the founder of the Public Mechanics design studio in Baltimore.
The art installation offers a visual representation of Sumwalt Run, a creek cutting through North Baltimore’s Remington neighborhood that was confined to a brick and concrete tunnel in the early 1900s when streets, buildings, and parks were built overtop. Now, the creek flows through the city’s stormwater sewer system.
As part of the “Ghost Rivers” installation, wavy blue thermoplastic lines appear to trickle across streets and sidewalks, and meet the walls of homes and other buildings, representing Sumwalt Run’s path underground. Signs add context about the creek and the neighborhood’s history.
Sites 3-11 of the “Ghost Rivers” installation opened in October 2023, while sites 1, 2, and 12 are scheduled to be completed in 2024. The project will begin with site 1 on Charles Street at Wyman Park Dell, and will end with site 12 on Falls Road near the Jones Falls.
Willen, who lives in Old Goucher, first learned about Sumwalt Run about eight or nine years ago when he was looking at an 1876 map and spotted a creek bisecting Remington to Charles Village.
Then, when COVID-19 emerged and Willen sought solace outdoors, he found himself listening to the water flowing underneath him.
“In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, like many of us, I spent more time walking around outside…. Walking around the neighborhood, I found these sewer covers where you could hear the sounds of the stream,” Willen said.
“These streams, their burial is haunting us still to this day,” he added. “Putting these waterways into concrete tunnels creates all of these ecological issues.”
Normally, plants, rocks, and soil help filter pollutants from stormwater runoff entering streams and rivers.
“If you think about a stream valley, a stream not in a concrete tunnel, it’s this complex ecosystem,” Willen said. “In addition to providing homes to plants, animals, and insects, the rain filters down through these plants. The streams suck up hundreds or thousands of gallons of water…. When it gets down to the stream, the stream has its own filtering mechanisms with the marsh grasses and the rocks of the stream.”
But since “ghost rivers” like Sumwalt Run have been covered, Baltimore has been facing the consequences, he said, as runoff has a more direct line to the Chesapeake Bay.
“When it’s in this concrete tube, it shoots very quickly through this tube and to the Chesapeake Bay,” Willen said.
There is a growing movement to uncover these buried waterways, a practice called “daylighting.”
The Sumwalt Run is not a good candidate for such action, Willen said, because it flows under streets and homes. But other covered waterways could be contenders for daylighting, like the Jones Falls, which is largely covered by the Interstate-83 Expressway.
“[The expressway is] nearing the end of its lifespan,” Willen said. “So sometime in the next 10-15 years, we’re going to have to look at are we spending upwards of half a billion dollars to repair this highway? Or do we remove it and make something beautiful there?”
He estimates that there could be approximately 40-50 buried creeks and streams of various sizes within Baltimore City.
For buried waterways that cannot be daylit, Willen said Baltimore can still mitigate the negative environmental impact of stormwater runoff by implementing more rain gardens, bioswales, and other landscape design features.
Willen has previously created other public art installations, like the “Library of Lost Gloves & Lost Loves” at Druid Lake in 2022. For that project, he and his wife Sarah collected missing gloves and placed them on top of the fence surrounding the lake with short fictional notes from their would-be owners. Willen said he finds joy in imagining the possibilities of what was and what can be, a goal he carried with him in “Ghost Rivers.”
“I really enjoy creating art that encourages people to daydream and speculate about different futures and pasts,” he said. “I like art that makes you look at the space around you in different ways or view it with new eyes.”
In designing “Ghost Rivers,” Willen gathered input from local residents about the project. Now that it’s complete, he said he has been validated to hear from community members who live near the sites of the “Ghost Rivers” installation and value the addition to their neighborhood.
“I’ve had great feedback from people who live in the neighborhood,” he said. “People have been coming up and wanting to talk about the project, the neighborhood history, thanking me for adding this to the neighborhood.”
You would think in a city that has been depopulating for the last 60 plus years would be a great candidate for daylighting ghost rivers and restoring ecosystems & watersheds on the surface.
If not now, when ?