The Harbor Wetland, next to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, is both a public space and a pollution-fighting waterfront feature.
Photographer: Philip Smith/The National Aquarium
A Floating Island in Baltimore Raises Hope for a Waterfront Revival
The designers of the National Aquarium’s new exhibit, the Harbor Wetland, combined nature and technology to help restore a long-polluted urban waterway.
No reasonable human has dared wade willingly into the brackish waters beside Baltimore’s National Aquarium for generations. Perched on a pair of piers extending into the city’s Inner Harbor, the facility is home to some 20,000 marine animals, swimming and slithering within a striking glass-crowned complex.
The urban environment outside its walls is less welcoming: The Jones Falls river, which feeds into Baltimore’s harbor, was a heavily polluted industrial waterway for most of the 20th century, and it still sweeps sewage, trash and toxic runoff into the downtown basin after every rainstorm.