Robert Giles and the incredible legacy of the road planning consultants that undermined their clients
There is new hope for long-neglected but stunningly beautiful Leakin Park: a bill passed by the 2024 Maryland General Assembly that authorizes a study and community input process that will examine new ways to manage the park under a city-state partnership, raising the hopes of many that the park will benefit from the attention and funding of the Maryland State Park system. Could there be a visitor center, park rangers, historic markers, well-marked trails and more in Leakin Park’s future? Let us hope so!!!!
That Leakin Park was not destroyed by I-70 leads us to one of the more interesting sidebars in the long history of the Road Fight: Robert Giles, a consultant working for the city road builders, told his clients, in no uncertain terms, that it was an horrifically bad idea to build an expressway through the park. This one brave soul, essentially defying those that paid for his report, was not alone in the category of consultants that undermined the road plans while being paid to do the opposite. (More shortly…)
Stop the Road provides the historical background for how the park was saved from destruction by interstate highway I-70. Short version: the defenders of the park filed a lawsuit that challenged the road planners on two grounds, the sufficiency of public hearings and a violation of the 4-F provision of the Highway Act of 1966 (which said there has to be no feasible alternative to building the highway through the park). The defenders of the park won on the public hearings issue, but that was a solvable problem from the city’s point of view. The problem for the road planners had more to do with new Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) studies that were linked to the new hearings.
This is where Mr. Giles and his report come into the picture.
Here is an excerpt from Stop the Road:
Giles’ primary task was to provide a technical ecological assessment of the impact of the highway on the park: defining, for example, the presence of wildlife and the degree to which certain species might be reduced or threatened. Giles, however, did not want… [the technical analysis to overshadow] his opinion—that the highway through the park was a monumentally bad idea… He spends the first eight pages expounding on the sanctity of such parks and admonishing highway officials for even considering destructive highway plans.86F Giles extolls the benefits of parks, as if he needs to instruct the ill-informed about the places where Man:
(1) can find conditions scaled to be compatible with his human potential; (2) avoid density stress; (3) feel safe from…air pollution, radiation, noise pollution, and water shortage; (4) experience diversity that is freeing of mind and spirit; and (5) gain the physical necessities for life…. [If] we are not to throw out any effort at achieving a properly designed, integrated city environment, we must maintain the open ground, the parks, and walkways and natural areas, along with the built-up land… Open space [should be regarded as] a fixed element…of an equal order of consideration with any kind of development.
He references Yellowstone National Park, calling it “irreplaceable…and immovable… It must be preserved in site or not at all. You can’t build a city there and find another place for the national park.” Giles stopped short of describing Leakin Park as “irreplaceable,” but he was quite clearly implying that it was.
As you might imagine it became rather difficult for highway planners to draft an EIS that would justify the highway-through-the-park when their own consultant said that doing so was tantamount to destroying Yellowstone National Park.
This was not an isolated example of the road planners having to fight with their own consultants.
An even more stunning example was the Urban Design Concept Team (UDCT). From 1967 to 1970 UDCT employed planners who surreptitiously helped organize the city-wide anti-highway coalition, the Movement Against Destruction. Further, they put their own contract at risk by going over the heads of their city-state clients to the federal highway administrator in the cause of saving Federal Hill and substituting the Ft McHenry alignment of I-95. They won: much to the chagrin of their city-state oversight board, Mayor D’Alesandro saved Fed’ Hill and the Inner Harbor by siding with the consultants in his history-changing decision of December 1968. And, yet another example: it was UDCT that hired Robert Giles, and one has to suspect that they knew exactly what kind of report Mr. Giles was going to prepare.
The cause of saving Fell’s Point similarly benefitted from a consultant who was hired to prove that Fell’s Point was not historic enough to warrant protections. However, Robert Kerr of the Urban Design Group instead found that (another book excerpt):
Of 354 structures, 76 percent were of “primary,” “exceptional,” or “major” consequence for preservation. Kerr finely articulated the case for preservation of Fell’s Point as a representation of working-class life, saying, “Who is to say that there is less dramatic and human value in the record of the manner in which the average citizen or artisan or mechanic lived out his life than in the artifacts, objects and setting associated with the great events and moments of human history?”
Kerr’s report was undoubtedly one of the reasons that the city-state legal team decided not to adjudicate the highway-through-the-historic-area legal issue after the courts temporarily stopped highway acquisitions in a 1972 decision.
More examples of folks sticking to their guns against the powers-to-be come from within city government where Housing Commissioner Bob Embry and Deputy Housing Commissioner Jay Brodie commiserated with anti-highway activists and surreptitiously supported the squatter’s movement that saved Fell’s Point houses from declining to the point of no return.
Still more: John Pearce, the Maryland State historic preservation officer, did not succumb to political pressure when he found that the planned route for I-83 through the lower Jones Falls and Fell’s Point would have “unmitigable adverse effects” on National Landmarks. His judgment meant that the city could only traverse Fell’s Point via an underwater tunnel, the cost of which was later determined to be prohibitive.
Indeed, the long battle over these destructive superhighways leads you to one heartening conclusion: that it is not such a rare thing for people to do the right thing even when doing the right thing goes against their own self-interest. Baltimore owes quite a debt of gratitude to these brave folks that stood up to their bosses, their clients, and the local power structure. They saved Baltimore from its own leadership.
Read more:
The Baltimore Brew, “A city-state partnership…” https://baltimorebrew.com/2024/07/05/a-city-state-partnership-seeks-to-rescue-baltimores-beautiful-but-beleaguered-gwynns-fallsleakin-park/
The Baltimore Fishbowl: “Can Maryland help save…” https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/can-maryland-help-save-baltimores-leakin-park/.
UDCT and saving Federal Hill: https://stop-the-road.com/the-book/2023/03/20/federal-hill-and-the-inner-harbor-the-conquistadors-of-concrete-vs-the-platitudeness-planners/
Saving Leakin Park: https://stop-the-road.com/the-book/2021/12/10/saving-leakin-park-from-the-expressway/.
Visit the Friends of Gwynns Falls Leakin Park.