Baltimore officials cut a ribbon Friday to mark the opening of West Shore Park, a new Inner Harbor park that city officials said will offer open green space and park benches for Harbor visitors.
The $4.5 million park stretches from the Baltimore Visitor Center to the Maryland Science Center.
Mayor Martin O?Malley, on hand for the ribboncutting, said the days of a decrepit trailer at the site that served as a visitor center are gone.
“Now when a visitor comes to Baltimore down Conway Street, they are greeted by grass, not pavement and by an interactive, state-of-the-art visitors center, not a modular trailer,” O?Malley said.
Andy Frank, who served as the Inner Harbor coordinator for the project, said he hopes “this beautiful new waterfront public space helps Baltimoreans rediscover the magnificent asset that millions of people from around the world visit each year.”
From groundbreaking, the park was completed in a swift nine months. A committee composed of community leaders, businesses and government agencies worked with a design team that included landscape architect firm Hord Coplan Macht of Baltimore and architect company Thomas Balsley Associates, of New York, which has designed more than 200 urban parks.
M.J. “Jay” Brodie, head of the Baltimore Development Corp., encouraged visitors to West Shore Park to pay attention to the small details of the park that make its design “truly architecturally beautiful.”
Those details include a long concrete wall that snakes around part of the open grass area. The wall is short and doubles as bench seating. But instead of being flat and long, it has cuts in the top to make it look like several interconnected benches. And the cuts are wide enough to prevent skateboarders from skating along the top of the wall.
There are also several concrete, ergonomically shaped lounge chairs perched on a hill that overlooks the Harbor Cruise ships.
“Why shouldn?t the public have lounge chairs at the park,” said Thomas Balsley, head of Thomas Balsley Associates.
He added that underground plumbing is ready and an area marked off for a future computer-controlled fountain that would include jet sprinklers programmed to create different waterfalls. City, civic and business leaders need to start a fundraiser to find the more than $1 million it will cost to build the fountain, Balsley said.
Baltimore City officials said they are happy the city won?t have to pay for maintenance of the park. The Partnership for Baltimore Waterfront, a nonprofit corporation, was created in October to handle maintenance and upkeep.
