By Rona Kobell

EJJI is fortunate to have two offices – one in West Baltimore, where our fiscal sponsor resides and has offered us space; and one at the Middle Branch Marina in Cherry Hill, where we will be putting a trailer on a deck to be close to the water. When we are not working from home, we’re at the marina.

There’s really not a space, yet, for us to work inside, and it’s frequently windy. There’s no restroom, no coffee, no food at all. And yet, there is no place we’d rather be. We’ve come to know the community who live aboard their boats year-round, and we love watching the fish, birds, and seasons change there. But mostly, we love the view, because it tells Baltimore’s story better than we can – and we’re professional storytellers!

From the marina, visitors can see Baltimore’s past, present and future. From our pier, to the left is Baltimore as it may have looked in the 1950s, with military-style housing, smokestacks pulsing dirty air upward, and trains running through a flat landscape. Straight ahead is downtown as we know it, a shining city on a slight hill. Look to the right and there is the promise of new developments at the area formerly known as Port Covington. Further is the Hanover Street Bridge, glamorous, more like the bridges of Washington, D.C., or Paris than like one of ours.

So, when Joel McCord of WYPR came out to interview us, of course I suggested we meet at the marina. No place can talk about what we are trying to do regarding environmental justice better than this spot, where people have suffered and new development has the potential to learn from injustices. That includes providing green space, access to water, and affordable housing to keep original residents in their neighborhoods. 

Cherry Hill began as a segregated neighborhood, deliberately cut off from the rest of the city by highways, and housed Black veterans returning from World War II. An ACLU report called it “one of the most striking examples of deliberate residential racial segregation in any city.”

Our marina offers the view of a different future. We can’t think of a better place to act on the promise of EJJI. We’ll have many stories to tell from there.