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Bruce Willen’s “Ghost Rivers” is a Public Monument to Baltimore’s Forgotten Waterways

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If you ever made the mistake of wearing Chuck Taylors to Wyman Park’s formerly-annual Punx Picnic back in the day, you might remember leaving with confusingly soggy feet, even on some sunny days. The Dell, for its part, remembers that it was born from a river. Buried alive, the water’s ghost still haunts us—occasionally burbling up from its grave to soak canvas shoes, dampen sunbathers’ blankets, or muddy dogs’ paws and toddlers’ knees as befuddled guardians look on, wondering just where that muck came from. 

Bruce Willen has made it his mission to show them. 

Willen’s ambitious public artwork “Ghost Rivers” meanders through asphalt, green spaces, and roughly a dozen city blocks spread across nearly two-and-a-half kilometers. A series of informative signposts and cartography-inspired pavement murals loosely trace the path of Sumwalt Run—a stream that once carved its way through north-central Baltimore, one of several bodies of water that shaped the city’s topography. 

Photo courtesy of Public Mechanics
Photo by Dave Cooper
The interest of the community really shaped the didactic text. That’s what good public art should do—respond to public interest.
Bruce Willen

In the shady northeast corner of the Wyman Park Dell, just below the intersection of Art Museum Drive and N. Charles Street, I find the first of twelve Capri-blue metal signposts. Willen is kind enough to give me a preview tour on a scorchingly hot day. It’s here, he points out, that the legacy of Sumwalt Run is most visible above-ground—the Dell was eroded into its familiar shape by untold centuries of water expanding and contracting with floods. 

When developers built what is today known as Charles Village in the early 20th century, the stream was buried in a series of sewers, and nearly all traces of the little hills and valleys it had created were flattened in favor of a tabula rasa for the ever-expanding urban grid. Willen sounds wistful as he pulls out archival photos, explaining that the famed Olmsted Brothers—the landscape architects of so many great Baltimore parks and neighborhoods—loved the natural topography and originally envisioned the stream and its embankments as a not-quite-linear park running all the way across to Lake Montebello. 

I crouch to look through the sign’s cut-out silhouette of the river, imagining what the Olmsteds might’ve seen when they first encountered the gully. “I was thinking about monuments and memorials,” Willen offers, “What might a monument to a lost landscape look like?”

Drawing from his background as a writer; graphic designer; and founder of the placemaking studio Public Mechanics, Willen has arrived at an elegant solution. The signs pack just the right amount of text to be engaging—with QR codes to encourage further research for the curious—and the cut-outs imply an interactivity that’s hard to resist. At nearly every stop, I find myself trying to take a photo overlaying the ghost river with the contemporary landscape—an exercise my phone’s tiny AI brain finds confusing when trying to autofocus, given the compositions’ inverted figure/ground relationship. 

Like so many creative projects, “Ghost Rivers” was conceived in the COVID-19 doldrums. Willen spent a lot of his pandemic time taking long walks around Charles Village and Remington. In the relative silence of a commuter-less city, his musician’s ear began to notice the sound of running water beneath certain streets. His curiosity was piqued, and he began a dive through old maps and records of the area. 

Willen explores the Sumwalt Run sewer, photo courtesy of the artist

Willen reached out to the Maryland Historic Trust and the Gutierrez Memorial Fund, who enabled funding and assistance for archival research. Arguably the coolest part of this process involved what Willen describes as “a spelunking adventure” beneath the city’s streets—getting to first-hand follow what’s left of Sumwalt Run as it trickles through sewers and subterranean drainage channels. 

In a funny twist, a project that was born out of a mandate for social distancing ended up becoming a community affair. Starting in 2020, the artist interviewed hundreds of neighbors to gather local histories and overwhelming support for the project, particularly in Remington. “People were enthusiastic and curious,” he recalls, “The interest of the community really shaped the didactic text. That’s what good public art should do—respond to public interest.” 

From the Baltimore DPW Archive
Bruce Willen behind the Church of the Guardian Angel, photo by the author
Church of the Guardian Angel, photo by the author
I wanted a visitor to be able to understand the neighborhood as a human ecosystem as well.
Bruce Willen

One of the most surprising revelations ended up becoming Site #4: the former Sumwalt’s Ice Pond on the corner of W. 28th and N. Howard St. Named for the local landowner, Sumwalt’s Pond provided ice for city households every winter (back when we had winters cold enough for bodies of water to freeze!) as well as recreation for generations of Baltimoreans who used its surface for ice skating. Sadly, the stream that fed the pond was rerouted through a storm sewer in 1908, and as developers filled in the uneven terrain around it to build houses, public patience for a stagnant puddle dwindled. In 1914 the city drained what was left of the pond, and today it would be largely forgotten, were it not for this new memorial. 

As we walk through Remington, the blue squiggles of “Ghost River” zig and zag through traffic, bike lanes, and—somewhat disconcertingly—dead end in front of an awful lot of housing, implying that the ground beneath highrises and heavy brick rowhomes might not be as solid as we would like to think. Willen points out slight depressions in streets or porches that tilt ever so subtly as evidence that the landfill has settled a bit in the past century. 

On 27th Street, the stream seems to emerge from a new development’s parking garage, clad, somewhat ironically, with a facade that nods nostalgically to an architectural vernacular that predates the land upon which it was built. This is Site #7, where even with post-pandemic car traffic, we can still hear the creek running beneath us if we listen closely. We follow the blue “Ghost River” across the street and into an alley, where Willen beams as he shows me his favorite secret spot. 

Behind the Church of the Guardian Angel, you can still see traces of the neighborhood’s hilly topography. Built in 1904, before developers leveled most of the surrounding land, the church’s back garden drops down several meters below street level. It’s one of those magical corners of Baltimore that feels like a portal to another time and place, a world away from the 7-Eleven parking lot just half a block away. 

We emerge on the other side of the block and make our way to Site #9, which poetically bears the title “People also flow like rivers.” Here, Willen discusses the neighborhood’s history of migration from Appalachia, as rural Americans sought work in Baltimore’s booming factories  during and after World War II. I learn that legendary feminist Bluegrass icon Hazel Dickens lived here, consorting with socialist labor organizers, students, and other migrants, writing songs—appropriately enough—about nostalgia for streams. 

Photo courtesy of Public Mechanics

“I wanted a visitor to be able to understand the neighborhood as a human ecosystem as well,” Willen explains. Those varying points of intersection between environmental, aesthetic, social, and political concerns are largely what make this project such a success. It’s hard to imagine that following a winding blue line through your hometown on a hot summer day can lead to so many discoveries, but “Ghost Rivers” is full of pleasant, informative surprises. 

While Willen confesses that it was a long process to get permission from the Baltimore Department of Transportation’s Right of Way placemaking program, he chuckles, “I still can’t believe they let me do this… a mile-long drawing across the city! I feel like I got away with something.” 

It’s here we part ways, and I continue southward to the remaining three sites. Weaving between half-empty strip malls, dilapidated industrial sites, and chain-link fences guarding vacant lots of baking asphalt in the shadeless heat I find myself getting angry at 20th century hubris. Who thought posterity would rather enjoy this than a river? Site #10 takes a more optimistic tone: “It’s easy to believe that the landscape we have inherited cannot be changed,” it begins, before citing successful examples of “daylighting” buried waterways from Seoul to New York’s Saw Mill River. 

Photo courtesy of Public Mechanics
Photo courtesy of Public Mechanics
23rd Street, photo by the author
Falls Road, photo by the author

I follow “Ghost Rivers” down to Site #11 on 23rd Street, and resist the temptation of a cold mezcalita on the street Lane Harlan has resurrected as her libationary empire. From there, it’s a frustrating detour around the car-centric intersection of Howard and North Ave to reach the finish line on Falls Road—highlighting the absurdity of how humans screwed up the landscape in the interest of using infrastructure to demarcate private property into more easily commodifiable right angles. It is here that the sad water briefly sees the light of day, meeting with the Jones Falls, before that river too is funneled into tunnels to accommodate the freeway downstream. By the time I get there, I am sweaty, have “Paved Paradise” stuck in my head, and am ready to personally take a jackhammer to the concrete imprisoning Sumwalt Run. I am fully expecting the final marker to be an equally vitriolic call to arms: Free the stream! Tear down Interstate 83! Make Rivers Great Again! 

Instead, it rewards patient viewers with what might be the, dare I say, cutest? anecdote about the area’s history. I won’t ruin that pleasant surprise for adventurous public art enthusiasts. 

I will recommend that the curious come out this Thursday, August 1st, at 8 PM for the celebratory Ghost Rivers Movie Night in Wyman Park Dell (Rain date: August 8th). Willen and his collaborators will be marking the completion of the sites in and around Wyman Park with screenings presented by Bob Wagner and Teresa Duggan (hosts of the ongoing series Bob & Teresa’s 16mm Movie Night).

They’ll be showing the rare 1983 documentary Jones Falls: The Stream That Shaped A City, and Study in Wet, “a beauty of abstract filmmaking made in 1964 by Homer Groening” (Matt Groening’s father, of Simpsons fame!). 

And while you’re sitting on a potentially-damp picnic blanket, look North towards the BMA sculpture garden. And imagine its lovely Wangetchi Mutu bronze “Water Woman” looking over the fountain, dreaming of the Ghost River below. Just don’t wear Chuck Taylors.

Photo courtesy of Public Mechanics

Featured image courtesy of Public Mechanics

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