Blog 4: Goals and Working on the Zine

Blog 4 – Goals and Working on the Zine

Goals

I have spent some time this week reflecting on our discussion about our goal for the event, and implicitly, for the project.  I did not think that we came to a full agreement about this and hope that we will return to it on Wednesday.  Where I think we left it was in the middle of a discussion about the extent to which our goal is trying to change the course of the current planning process.   Dr. King said that the class was in part inspired by the example of the Baltimore Heritage Society’s role in crystallizing public debate about the Superblock project.  They made a short film which highlighted the proposed destruction of a large number of historically important buildings.  Ultimately, that plan was not completed as we read in Dr. King’s chapter. 

It is unclear to me exactly where the current process is in terms of openness to influence.   Stacey Pack suggested that it is about 90 percent set, although they don’t have complete financing yet.  Does this mean that the idea of building a new building and then tearing down the old one is set? That the architectural plans for the artist rendering have been drawn?   The part which seems most incomplete is how vendors are going to be selected for the new market.   I watched the video mentioned in the press release and it talks about the importance of current vendors as well as the need for “more diversity” and “different food offerings.”  There are going to be fewer rather than more vendors in the new building, so what does this mean for current vendors?  When we pushed Pack a little on what was going to happen with current vendors, she talked about working with people to modernize, i.e. accept credit cards.  

My own reaction to what we have seen and read so far is mixed.   The current building shows a lot of signs of wear and I am ready to believe that the underlying mechanics (HVAC, etc) are inefficient and probably have not been maintained well.   I look at the artist drawings of the proposed new building and am disturbed by the lack of anything showing how this will fit into the surrounding neighborhood.  I don’t have a clear sense of scale, although it seems to be taller than the current market.   I don’t understand how this building interacts with its surroundings which is usually something planners and architects care about.   That having been said, one of the nicest markets I have been to in the last few years was a glass box in the middle of 17^th century plaza in Spain.   So who knows?  On balance, I think that replacing the building probably makes sense, although I have questions about the exact design being put forward.

In many of our class discussions we have talked about the question of “Who is the market for?”  We find in some of the Sun reporting, as well as in the information about the new plan, signals that the planners see the market as an opening to attract more affluent shoppers – both local residents from the UM medical complex and residents from the broader Baltimore community.  We are concerned that needs of current local customers of the market, many of them lower-income, are not being considered in the city’s desire to use it as an attraction.  

I would suggest that we should focus our effort on the question of who is the market for.   The answer to this question should inform what kind of vendors are needed in the market and how they should be picked.  Since, as far as I can tell, this is the least well-defined part of the plan as we currently understand it, it is a topic that we might be able to influence in a useful way.

 

Working on the Zine

In our last class, we set a goal of getting the zine out in two week, by Oct. 3.   Dr. Drabinski made the great suggestion that we have a timeline running down on side of the zine as a road-map.  We talked about including short, zippy paragraphs to match items on the timeline and find pictures as well.  Markele provided a first shot at the timeline.  I have revised it slightly to focus more specifically on Lexington Market dates.   My suggestion would be to include both specifics about the market (acquiring land, building the first shed, the fire, etc.) and dates associated with human interest things like profiles of market people or the Tubbs restaurant story. 

Between the draft history in my last blog and work with the newspaper archives, we have the information we need for the zine although it needs to be rewritten in shorter, more accessible segments.  We have collectively identified a fair number of usable photographs from different sources. Once we agree on which milestones to put on the timeline, I think we have photographs to use.  Calvin has shared information about zines which helped me better understand what our goal is.  I am hopeful that tomorrow we will be able to sort out exactly who is doing what to meet our target date.

Interesting information

In 2015, the John Hopkins in collaboration with the city produced a report on Baltimore’s food environment.  [Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. “Mapping Baltimore City’s Food Environment: 2015 Report,” 2015.]

Twenty-five percent of Baltimore meets the definition of a food desert and the report included planning by the city to improve the availability of food.   One of the measures used, the Healthy Food Availability Index (HFAI), measures the presence of whole staple foods and health food options.  The maximum possible score is 28.5 and a non-supermarket can count as an “alternative supermarket” if it has a score of 25 or more.   Public market scores range from 4 to 22.5.  The plan does include working with the redesign of Lexington Market to increase its score to 25.   Currently, however, most of the area around Lexington Market is classified as a food desert.