they might be employed for relief of the critical traffic situation in that city is shown on plate 52.[1]
An old city, growing by the coalescence of numerous ancestor villages, the irregular and discontinuous street plan of Baltimore is the despair of the stranger and the daily inconvenience of its own citizens. The city lies in the path of one of the heaviest highway-traffic streams in the country, and by millions of travelers who have moved with that stream the difficulties of the Baltimore passage are well remembered.
The close block plan and narrow streets of the older sections of the city are chiefly an inheritance from the early nineteenth century. The principal business section lies in a relatively small area centrally located from east to west and clings closely to an inner harbor on the Patapsco River, into which formerly there came the many small vessels that maintained the trade of the city with the Chesapeake Bay country of the Eastern and Western Shores.
The old residential section of the city clustered closely about the central business section, which has grown little in size in the last 50 years. But, since 1900, the more well-to-do families that formerly lived in this older section have moved in large numbers to outlying suburban areas, some of which have been included within revised limits of the growing city. The old homes, vacated by this movement, have descended to the less well-to-do, and by stages large areas have finally reached a critical stage of decay.
Symptomatic of the low state of a large part of the property in these slum areas, the map shows the block locations of numerous properties upon which the city has acquired tax liens after failure of tax payment, and also the location of certain areas now in process of acquisition by the Federal Government as sites of slum-clearance projects. Within the business district itself there are many properties which probably are not included among those taken by the city for nonpayment of taxes only because the improvements that once occupied the land have been razed and the land converted into parking lots, most of which are of an order of unsightliness that is an affront to the pride of the city.
It is apparent that the whole interior of the city is ripe for the major change that it must undergo to afford the necessary relief to pressures generated by the effort to force the stream of twentieth-century traffic through arteries of the early nineteenth century. The map shows where properties are dying. In places, new and important developments are beginning to occur—developments of great possible significance in relation to the future plan of the city and particularly to the new major arteries that should supply the skeletal structure for that plan.
- ↑ The block location of properties acquired by the city under tax liens, and the location of areas to be acquired for slum clearance, as shown on the map (plate 52), are correct as of February 1, 1939. In number and location the various classes of highway facilities indicated have an illustrative purpose only. Although, as shown, they are consistent generally with the principles enunciated in this report, it is not asserted that all of the indicated facilities are at present required or feasible, nor that, if needed, they are practicably located.
For example, the map shows that two of the planned slum-clearance projects of the Federal Government lie directly athwart the possible courses of major new radial arteries. The new development of these areas and other developments of similar character that will certainly follow should not proceed far in the absence of a definite plan for the needed new street and highway facilities. If it does, new and
