This is going to drive some people bonkers. It's headlined "Rt. 43 could be road to new jobs:"
As the first drivers roll down a new $75 million stretch of White Marsh Boulevard today, they will wind through one of the few large undeveloped commercial tracts on the East Coast accessible to Interstate 95. They will head toward a place that once provided a living for tens of thousands of workers but fell on hard times.
More than two decades in the works, the new Maryland Route 43 will open today with high expectations - and even a parade.
"In the last 10 years I can't think of any one project that was comparable to this with the new road and the new industrial opportunities," said Daraius Irani, director of applied economics at RESI, Towson University's research and consulting arm.
"It's been called the road to opportunity, because it's not for transportation," said Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. "It's for jobs."
What kind of place is this? Might sound familiar:
In the 1940s and '50s, thousands of young families were drawn to the Middle River and Essex areas by well-paying industrial jobs. But advances in technology and a changing global market rendered many of those jobs obsolete.
During World War II, the Glenn L. Martin Corp. employed more than 50,000 workers. Today, 1,200 people work at the company's offshoots, Lockheed Martin and Middle River Aircraft Systems, according to Fronda Cohen, the county's marketing director.
Likewise, Mittal Steel, the descendant of Bethlehem Steel, employs fewer than one-tenth of the workers it did during peak years, she said. For decades, the southeastern part of the county stagnated, plagued by a shortage of jobs, an excess of rundown apartment buildings and an increase in crime.Then a transformation began in the Middle River area. Shoddily built apartment complexes were torn down and replaced with elegant homes. Developers began changing the image of the waterfront, from a place to sip a beer and drop a line, to a place to drop anchor - for a yacht.
Along the way, ideas came and went for a large spread of undeveloped land. The A.V. Williams tract, as it was known, was seen by some to be a good spot for an Asian theme park. Others pictured a NASCAR raceway there.
Lots of parallels to Pittsburgh here. Questions of class and economics. Questions of roads and development. Urban cores versus suburbs. Old industry versus new technology.
Have at it.
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