Pictures Say It All

Pictures taken after the Baltimore Book Festival and other events in Mount Vernon Place tell the real story. No one seems to care about the damage to the marbles, trees, and other plantings caused by the huge crowds drawn to this small public space or by the ground crews responsible for stringing up electrical wires, erecting stages and booths, or hauling in picnic tables and funnel cake carts. The city government, the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts (BOPA), the vendors, and the various other event sponsors treat Mount Vernon Place like it's the Baltimore City Fairgrounds. They set up shop, make money, and leave, and Mount Vernon Place suffers.

BOPA runs roughshod over the four squares of Mount Vernon Place when it sets up for Baltimore Book Festival each September. Yet, BOPA seldom, if ever, pays for the damage caused by this event. The acting director of the Baltimore City Department of Recreation Parks, Connie Brown, told area residents at a fall general meeting of the Mount Vernon Belvidere Association (MVBA) that BOPA pays the usual permitting fee for using Mount Vernon Place, but that it doesn't pay any extra money to offset the costs for repairing the grass or the plantings. Brown mentioned also that Rec & Parks does not set aside money in its annual operating budget to cover repair to Mount Vernon Place--in fact, Mount Vernon Place doesn't even get a line item in the department budget--even though it anticipates damage from the book festival and other fairs and festivals.

For promotional purposes, BOPA boasts that the September book festival draws on average "60,000-plus festival-goers." Who in their right mind would even begin to believe that an event crowd of that size would not leave an imprint?!

Where were the Rec & Parks people when the crews were putting things up and tearing things down for Flower Mart or the book festival? Did the Friends of Mount Vernon Place (FMVP) have anyone on hand to supervise the crews and make sure they didn't cast fences into the flowerbeds? How can BOPA get away with this year after year without paying its fair share of the maintenance and repair costs? You'd think we were dealing with a bunch of 12 year-olds since no one wants to claim responsibility for making sure that BOPA and other organizations that sponsor events in the squares leave Mount Vernon Place in a better condition than when they found it...



The Project for Public Spaces plan calls for a single managerial body to oversee permitting and use of Mount Vernon Place. It also provides a sample terms of use policy. So, why isn't anyone listening to PPS?

Write, email, or call BOPA. Tell them you think it's time for them to start contributing their fair share to the maintenance of Mount Vernon Place.