Montgomery County sentinel. [volume] (Rockville, Md.) 1855-1974, 1957-09-05
With Relative Ease
Tunnel Expressway
SIithers Thru City

BALTTMORE'S NEW tunnelexpressway sys
tenn winds through II miles of metropolitan real
estate and across its famous port with compare
lively little interference with community life
Scheduled for opening in December, when
the $50 100000 Patapsco River tunnel will finally
break the Baltimore bottleneck" the expressway
was planned so that only 25 commercial estab
lishments were completely eliminated about six
percent of the 426 parcels taken in rightsof-way
negotiations And these were all comparatively
small businesses such as gasoline service stations
used car lots neighborhood stores restaurants
and bars
On the entire 17-mile length through Canton,
Fairfield Brooklyn and other busy communities,
178 families were moved. This contrasts with 81
families displaced from eleven city blocks by the
Port of New York Authority in building compare.
lively short approaches to new Third Tube for
New York's Lincoln Tunnel, opened last spring.
On one So mile stretch, between Potee Street
in Baltimore and Elkridge in Howard County, not
a single dwelling was disturbed.
This extremely small dislocation of property
was made possible by favorable terrain and the
ingenuity of engineers engaged by the Maryland
State Roads Commission, which is building this
bypass of Baltimore streets.
IN ONE AREA four huge lumber warehouses
and several small mountains of scrap metal
doomed directly in the path of the southern APP
proach. This problem was solved by clipping the
ends off all four buildings and by relocating near
ly one million tons of nearby scrap iron.
In Canton the expressway slips through the
entire tank field of the ESQ Refinery without so
much as scratching the shining paint off single
tank Considering the varying space requirements
for dual-lane expressway, this squeeze play is
considered tricky road design.
1t also saved hundreds of thousands of dollars
in right-of-way damages
At one point contractors excavated through
several stories of long-abandoned brewery vaults
in East Baltimore before reaching the roadway
elevation and also sealed off the vaults by means
of concrete walls. This turned out to be the re-
mains of a century-old brewery-later a distl
lery-which in 1925 gave way to a set of row
houses. The houses were removed-the caverns
excavated and sealed-and the tunnel approach
moved on.
The major railroads serving Baltimore fur
nished the design engineers less of headache
than might be expected. The Expressway merely
scars over their heads as if on magic carpet
The Pennsylvania Railroad yard at Canton
is spanned with only minor dislocation. The Penn
sy's main line between Washington and New York
is crossed twice, once at Elkridge-the extreme
west tip of the Tunnel Approach System-and
again at Bayyiew yards in East Baltimore. At
1Bayview also the Baltimore and Ohio Railroads
4 = y
hoped over by K-truss twospan bridge cover
ing 967 feet.
ON THE NORTH SHORE of the Baltimore
harbor, traffic from the tunnel energies into day
light in the middle of the Canton railroad yard
Here a substantial portion of the yard was tenn
porarily relocated and will be replaced following
completion of the project
Only three major residential areas were dis
turbed the whole length of the Expressway
Armistead Gardens, a Pulaski Highway housing
project lost its southeast corner when twenty
buildings housing IS family units were removed
Along Quail Street in Highlandtown 81 row houses
in four-block area from Eastern Avenue to
Hudson Street were needed. In the vicinity of
Arundel Gardens, a housing development in the
Brooklyn area, 80 homes were found to be in the
path of the southern approach.
The Maryland Roads Commission, working
from information developed by the Commissions
consulting engineers made at least two appraisals
of the value of the taking from each affected
property and the damages to the remainder. These
transactions ranged in complexty from simple
purchases of vacant lots to major Encouragement
of industry, in the of the scrap iron and
the lumber warehouses.