Recollections of a Red Line marketer
Disclaimer: This op-ed is my own personal opinion based off of my experiences and should not represent the opinion of What Weekly as a publication.
About six years ago I signed on with a creative firm in Baltimore whose client was the Baltimore City Department Of Transportation. My official title was “Guerrilla Marketing Coordinator” for the Baltimore Red Line. It was an interesting job – a real “in the trenches” kind of experience. My responsibilities consisted of manning a lot of tables at farmers markets and festivals, canvasing neighborhoods along the proposed route of the Red Line and giving informative albeit boring presentations to businesses.
To bring everyone up to speed, The Red Line is a proposed 14.1-mile light rail train that runs east to West across Baltimore. It goes as far west as Woodlawn and as far east as the Johns Hopkins Bayview Campus. It will run service to neighborhoods like Edmondson Village, Rosedale, Allendale, Downtown, Fells Point, Harbor East, Canton and Highland town to name some but not all. At this stage, it has substantial financial backing from the Baltimore City, Baltimore County and the federal government. However, that backing still isn’t enough to approve any groundbreaking.
Now, with the new Governor releasing a new state budget that will directly impact the projects’ future, vested groups have refocused their attention on getting their opinions heard.
I was able to meet a lot of characters in my tenure as a Red Line Guerrilla Marketer. The ones that I am about to describe represent, for all intents and purposes, the loudest people in the Red Line debate as I experienced it. There are, of course, as many unique characters at play as there are residents in the city and county, but I’m not writing a book about it and I imagine we’d both prefer this article be an easy read.
On the West side
When I think of west Baltimore, the first thought that crosses my mind is: “Enormous eager work force with no reliable public transportation for getting to work or school.” Yes there are busses, but anyone who has relied on busses for their main mode of transportation knows that you can’t count on them entirely and expect to have a reputation for being punctual. For this reason and many others, the West side of Baltimore is for the most part in favor of the Red Line.
Ever since the signing of the Red Line Community Compact, West Side community associations have stayed pretty well engaged in the project. To them, the Red Line is an opportunity for jobs. Currently it can take up to two hours to ride a bus from West to East Baltimore. But the red line promises a trip of 45 minutes from Woodlawn to Hopkins Bayview Campus.
When talking to people along the West Side Corridor, I encountered far more proponents than opponents to the project. Still, not everyone was on board. For those living along Edmondson Avenue the prospect of a lengthy construction process was a major concern. But the greatest reasons for objecting wasn’t about what was about to happen, but what already had happened.
The huge scar across west Baltimore known as Route 40 is widely perceived as a failed public project that resulted in the bulldozing of entire city blocks of homes and fractured the community. The bottom line is that distrust in city government goes back generations and isn’t something that could be easily ignored.
Downtown
Downtown is always an interesting place to talk with people about the Red Line. Mostly you interact with businesses and business associations. They are, by in large for the construction of the Red Line.
Being that not many people live in downtown proper, you get a lot of people who may not feel like the Red Line directly impacts their lives. As a result, most people tended to cavalierly lean one way or the other. A lot of people were interested about how it will help them get to work, but oddly enough, I encountered more people that really just wanted to hear about how it will help them bar hop from Fells point to federal hill or get home from on Orioles game without having to sit in hours worth of traffic.
On The East Side
Depending on where on the East Side of Baltimore you live, you could either be a staunch supporter of a great endeavor or a proverbial crusader against the scourge that is the Red Line. Starting in Harbor East, the businesses seem more interested in the future of the Red Line than the people. This might have to do with the fact that Harbor East station will be underground so it won’t disrupt the traffic and that there are a lot of people that live in Fells Point and Canton that work in Harbor East.
If you’ve ever been on Eastern Avenue, Fleet Street or Boston Street during rush hour, you know that it turns into a parking lot more often than not. Taking this into consideration, one could deduce that a light rail system servicing this area would help to appease the congestion, especially if it’s underground.
And THIS is where the crux of it all comes into play. The Red Line will run underground between Downtown and Fells Point and then resurfaces at Boston and Hudson Street right in front of The Can Company building – And people from Canton are PISSED. To them, it seems like it is an assault on their very way of life. Most of the people in Canton live a car-based lifestyle and for one reason or another have an aversion to public transportation. I only say this because I literally spent months asking Canton residents for their opinions while I was trying to get people to sign a petition in support of the Red Line. Every now and then I would hear reasonable objections to the Red Line, maybe one in ten people supported it.
Then there was this whole other more uncomfortable side to Canton opposition. One time I asked a group of young white, twenty-somethings if they were supporters of the Red Line and their response was “Red Line? You mean Black Line. No way. I would support a White Line.” Or this other time where someone interrupted me while talking to a inquisitive resident to let me know how the construction of the Red Line was going to “link the East and West drug trades” in Baltimore. It sounds gross to hear, and I am not trying to imply that that’s how most people in the neighborhood feel. However, if the Red Line debate were a house party where the neighborhoods were different cliques, Canton definitely has the most vocally racist friends in the group.
City Government
Here is all I will say about the city: in general, the city government wants the Red Line to happen. Hell, they’ve invested so much time and energy into it. The people that work on the ground level truly believe in the building of The Red Line. I just feel bad for them because they constantly have to change their “facts,” specifically the timeline. I remember handing out fliers that said the project would be finished in 2015. Now the project is scheduled for completion in 2022.
The longer this project draws out, the less it seems like a debate of good or bad idea and the more it seems like a battle of wills.
So what kind of person are you when it comes to the Red Line and what you would like to see happen? What other types of people have you experienced in this ongoing debate? These were just the people that stuck out the most in my experience. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
