This spring, I found myself kneeling in the centre of a busy four-lane intersection in Baltimore as trucks and honking traffic roared past. Sheltered by a tight circle of road cones and a diligent traffic control crew, I carefully cut and placed sinuous blue segments onto the pavement. With the help of two team members from Equus Striping, we melted these materials to the asphalt, completing a wavering blue line meandering diagonally across the wide intersection.
This installation joins twelve public art sites that span a 2.4-kilometre stretch across Baltimore’s Remington and Charles Village neighbourhoods, collectively tracing the lost path of Sumwalt Run, a buried stream that still flows beneath the streets. The project, Ghost Rivers, creates a real-life cartographic overlay on the city’s public roadways, sidewalks, and alleys, mapping a hidden waterway — and the stories that run through it.
So how did I wind up dodging angry drivers for the sake of a lost creek? In the Spring of 2020, like many of us, one of my pandemic pastimes was taking long and aimless walks through my city. As I explored Baltimore’s side streets and back alleys, I kept encountering the sound of active running water echoing up from certain storm drains — one that was always present, rain or shine. I remembered a now-lost creek that I had spotted years-prior on a historic survey of Baltimore. This stream was literally erased from the map, channeled into the city’s storm sewers in the early 20th century and covered over by roads, houses and factories.
Encountering the ghosts of this lost stream had me searching for more information and began sparking ideas about ways I might bring its lost landscapes back to the surface. What started as a personal curiosity and research project began a four-year saga that would include extensive archival research, navigating the challenges of installing an unusual public project and a spelunking adventure through Baltimore’s storm sewers.
Through wider work with my studio Public Mechanics, l take an experiential and experimental approach to integrating design with exploratory, sculptural and play-based art for public and cultural spaces. Many of my projects exist at the intersection of public art, placemaking, urbanism, experience design and community branding — with clients and collaborators that have included the Baltimore Museum of Art, Field Operations, Ziger/Snead Architects, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and U.S. Green Building Council. Throughout my practice, I attempt to answer the question: how can we connect more deeply with the overlooked places, histories, systems and symbols that surround us?
With that spirit in mind, I saw an opportunity to develop what I was learning about Baltimore’s buried rivers into something unexpected and poetic that would connect the community with its hidden history and landscape. To do the project justice, I began applying for grants to go deeper and to translate this work into a more permanent physical installation (navigating the world of grant writing and fundraising was a real learning curve!)
Early grants from Maryland Historic Trust and the Gutierrez Memorial Fund enabled me to do more in-depth archival research, as well as deep engagement with the Remington communities through a series of workshops, surveys and interviews with hundreds of local residents to identify places or narratives within the neighbourhood that might inform and enrich the project. From the beginning, Ghost Rivers was met with substantial enthusiasm from the Remington community, who were true partners in bringing the project to life. Early questions and feedback from residents helped inspire the work and foreground local histories within the project narrative.
So, what might a monument to a lost landscape look like? As humans, we’re myopically focused on memorializing people, events and anthropocentric culture. I wanted to explore ways to bring that same level of attention, emotional connection and remembrance to our shared landscapes. Linking the past and future of the land to human stories and human history makes us reconsider the places we inhabit, hopefully inspiring new levels of care and connection.
I also wanted to develop a design concept that could engage people on multiple levels, whether they randomly encountered a single Ghost Rivers installation as they passed through the neighbourhood or sought to dive deeply into the story of Baltimore’s buried waterways. I used a process of sketching, photography, graphic design and digital modelling to determine the proposed form and site-specific locations of the project. One Photoshop file included dozens of layers of historic maps, to help accurately plot lost stream paths.
Once I had developed a rough visual concept for the installation, the next crucial step was to get approval from Baltimore’s Department of Transportation, which has a Right of Way Art program for community-led placemaking projects. I knew that any design concept and materials approach needed to be loose enough to adapt and respond to their feedback. After proposing five different installation and materials approaches, along with numerous design iterations, we finally landed on a direction for signage and pavement marking, using thermoplastic, the material used to demarcate bike lanes or highway graphics, where it’s glued and melted into the surface.
The pale blue shade evokes the colour of water on maps, appropriate for this one-to-one scale map on city streets. The wavy line is a playful and surprising gesture meant to evoke flowing water. To allow visitors and community members to continue their learning, we installed sculptural interpretive signs with QR codes that connect to a content-rich website that includes numerous archival photos, maps and multimedia resources that draw parallels between social infrastructure and natural ecosystems.
Each metal signpost alongside the installation sites features a unique “river” cut-out that echoes the shape of the lost stream path. Visitors can peer through each cut-out to visualize the course of Sumwalt Run at that location. Other project activations have included group guided walking tours and a community celebration with a procession featuring the Underground Water Goddess, a giant puppet constructed from reclaimed materials by the Black Cherry Puppet Theater.
Ghost Rivers fits with a growing movement of artist-led projects over the past decade or so, using creative interventions to draw attention to the history and future of buried waterways. Projects like Nathan Kensinger’s walking tours and site-specific video installations of New York’s lost watershed, Rachel Parish’s Emergence installations and performances at the headwaters of Atlanta’s buried creeks, Stacy Levy’s Missing Waters large scale collaborative drawing project in Flushing Bay in New York and City as Living Laboratory’s Rescuing Tibbetts Brook daylighting project use various tactics to reengage city residents with the waters that brought them to life. These projects are all the more urgent as climate change overwhelms aging grey infrastructure, and the folly of ensewering our waterways becomes ever more apparent.
Already, the response to Ghost Rivers has far exceeded expectations. I love seeing people get psyched about the project for totally different reasons, whether it’s ecology, art, discovering a hidden history or gaining a new understanding of their environment. One of my favourite pieces of feedback came from a recent visitor who said that she “suddenly saw the urban landscape in a totally new way” after encountering Ghost Rivers’ blue line meandering through the streets.
I hope that the project will advance conversations about the future of Baltimore’s urban waterways, green infrastructure and potential for daylighting buried streams. Locally, the Jones Falls river, which runs through culverts below an expressway in downtown Baltimore, is a prime candidate for daylighting.
Living in an urban setting, it’s easy to feel disconnected from the rhythms of the natural world, to feel like our entire environment is constructed. It’s obvious that our efforts to make urban natural assets ‘go away’ through culverts and other barriers have had haunting consequences. Ghost Rivers is an invitation to look at the urban landscape with new eyes, to differently understand the place where we live, to be reminded that humans too are part of the natural environment, and that even in the middle of a city, we live surrounded by natural landscapes.
Bruce Willen is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, musician, and the principal of Public Mechanics — a studio focused on public art, design, and placemaking for public and cultural spaces.
Artist Bruce Willen’s latest project maps the routes of buried and channelized creeks, revealing the city’s embedded histories.