Hutzell: What a pink puffy coat reveals about cleaning up Baltimore’s Middle Branch

I fell on my face climbing out of restored wetlands on the Middle Branch. No one saw it, so that was good.

That graceless exit from one of Maryland’s premier Chesapeake Bay restoration projects ultimately led me to Steven Johnson. And he, in turn, led me to a little pink puffy coat outside his South Baltimore office.

The connection between the wetlands and the coat is crucial to understanding Reimagine Middle Branch. It’s a $178 million effort to redevelop neighborhoods along one of the Chesapeake Bay’s most neglected shorelines, 11 miles along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River.

The coat is part of a drive to keep students at eight South Baltimore schools warm this winter, but it also symbolizes what’s possible in this part of the city.

State, city, and federal agencies and nonprofits are pouring millions into the idea that environmental justice can spark a much greater change.

“There are always problems, but sometimes you can only do one at a time,” said Johnson, executive director of the South Baltimore 7 United Communities Coalition, known as SB7. “This could be just the spark to open that greater and broader conversation. And sometimes, you just need a proof of concept.”

Johnson and I met briefly over mini crab cakes and deviled eggs in a MedStar Harbor Hospital conference room. Leaders and supporters of the Middle Branch initiative were celebrating.

Across the water at the tip of land known as Ferry Bar, the Baltimore Peninsula redevelopment is progressing in fits and starts. On this side, things are looking greener.

I wrote about Middle Branch two years ago, calling it a poster child for Maryland’s latest approach to cleaning up the Chesapeake. It’s one of the first five tributaries in the Whole Watershed Program: Antietam Creek, the Severn River, the Choptank, Newport Bay and Middle Branch.

Along the branch, South Baltimore is a historic dumping ground, separated from the rest of the city by dirty water, dirty air and a history of industrial pollution. Smokestacks, incinerators, coal dust and rail and shipping yards define life here.

Johnson’s family lived it. He was born at Harbor Hospital, when it was still called South Baltimore General. He moved to West Baltimore as a child, but his extended family suffers health complications related to air quality.

“Ninety-five percent of us have upper respiratory illnesses, whether it’s asthma or whether it’s bronchitis, and our family is not the only one,” he said.

The nonprofit partners with the Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative — the environmental component.

The South Baltimore Gateway Partnership, funded by $8 million a year in grants from the Horseshoe Casino downtown, is at the center of this initiative. Maryland just added another $17 million to the $80 million in funding secured so far.

Donors, organizers and neighbors came to the hospital to celebrate 10 years of environmental work. They’ve spent $35 million to build 20 acres of wetlands at the Patapsco Delta, along Hanover Street and next to MedStar.

Attention now turns to Smith Cove along Waterview Avenue. Another $36 million will restore 9.67 acres of wetlands, filtering 314 acres of urban stormwater runoff that currently washes into the river.

“We’re celebrating the progress on a community promise that was long overdue, and the groundbreaking of new beginnings,” said Brad Rogers, the partnership’s executive director and the leading force of the resiliency initiative.

Community members were there to talk about how the project brings hope, including Johnson.

“The work that we’re doing today will be seen 40 years from now,” he told the crowd, “and they will look back and say that’s when the change for Baltimore happened.”

We agreed to meet, and I wandered off into the new wetlands.

Grass plantings haven’t filled in yet, so a network of shiny plastic strips keeps Canada geese from devouring those green shoots. Constructed sandbanks lay dry at low tide, pocked with wooden piles that provide habitat for fish and crabs when the water rolls back.

A cormorant watched as I walked the shoreline, my boots crunching the gravel foundation of the manmade wetlands. Downtown rose in the distance, beyond the Middle Branch horizon.

Bam, fell on my face. At least the bird wasn’t a laughing gull.

Birds, it turns out, are an early sign that things are improving.

“There’s been a lot of birds that have shown up that have not been here for years,” Johnson said a few weeks later at Hon’s Honey, a coffee shop on Pennington Avenue.

We were talking about whether all this money will actually improve the lives of people in Cherry Hill, Curtis Bay and 17 other neighborhoods that make up this part of Baltimore.

Training programs fill environmental restoration jobs. Grants fund community groups. Seeing clean water, taking a kayak out or going swimming could change a young life.

Stonewall Capital is building One Westport along the waterfront. It will add 1,000 homes in a part of the city with low homeownership, 300 of them for low-income and first-time buyers.

But will the people who live here now benefit?

“Resiliency is more than just protecting our shoreline,” Johnson said. “It’s protecting the people who have weathered the storms in these communities for generations and decades.”

Sometimes, there are more immediate needs than job skills or waterborne dreams of environmental justice. Sometimes you need a warm winter coat.

SB7 is raising $120,000 through Warm Up SoBo, partnering with city schools to buy 5,000 winter coats for South Baltimore students. The deadline is Dec. 18, and it has a long way to go.

The coat in Johnson’s office is the first, a symbol of what people could do along a renewed Middle Branch.

“What if we get those same organizations to lean into the lack of dental care, the lack of fresh food access here?” Johnson said. “What else can we lift up? What else can we create?”