The urban creek called Sumwalt Run was consigned to culvert and all but forgotten for more than 100 years.
Photo: Baltimore Department of Public Works/Public Mechanics
A ‘Ghost River’ Is Unearthed in Baltimore
To visualize the transformation of streams into sewers — and highlight the city’s water pollution woes — an artist reanimated an urban creek buried for more than a century.
At first, the distant rustle of running water is too muffled to hear over the hum of traffic. But then you can hear the rippling sound rising from a manhole cover, steps from the wavy blue line on the street that marks its source — a stream buried more than a century ago.
“It really is like a ghost — faint but still there,” says Bruce Willen, a 42-year-old artist and designer in Baltimore, Maryland, who has created a public art project that traces the path of a long-forgotten urban waterway. Ghost Rivers reconstructs the meandering journey of Sumwalt Run, entombed in a brick-and-concrete culvert at the dawn of the 20th century, through a series of pavement markings and interpretive street signs in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Remington.