BALTIMORE — A new event aims to bring new life to a more rundown intersection of north Baltimore - and hopes the excitement can spread.
The inaugural York Road Free Music and Arts Festival is taking place from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday.
It will take over the intersection of Woodbourne Avenue at York Road - specifically, the Family Dollar parking lot and part of Woodbourne - with about 20 craft vendors and 10 food/beverage vendors.
The event will be headlined by Easy Star All Stars, and will feature local vendors like Atwater's, and a 21-and-older area serving alcohol that will be hosted by Mother's Grille.
The festival is a debut of sorts for the York Road Improvement District, which is focused on reviving the corridor between Northern Parkway and 42nd Street.
Besides the Festival, the group is looking at a number of ways of repurposing streets or blocks for public events, said new executive director Samuel Storey.
York Road has long been a dividing line between the more prestigious, stately neighborhoods to its west (Guilford and Homeland), and the more low-key homes (including many rowhouses) in the Govans and Pen Lucy neighborhoods to the east.
Asked about this historic divide, Storey said:
We view our role as really connecting the east and the west... We view York Road as being a zipper, or has the opportunity to be a zipper, to two sides of the community that, as you said, has been divided, and really had a lot of differences and division and blockades over the years. Some of those have been intentional, historically. York Road was a part of redlining, was really ground zero to redlining back in the day. My organization has really been deliberate and intentional at seeing how my organization can help bridge that divide.
He noted the group also hopes to bridge the divide between north and south - between the area of Belvedere Square and the Pen Lucy community.
The nearby Loyola University and Notre Dame of Maryland University are major supporters of the initiative, including getting student volunteers to go door-to-door giving out fliers. Storey is a Loyola employee, and the university sponsored his position to help kick off the organization.
The group is in the process of transforming Lortz Lane - a small alley-like street between Bellona Avenue and York Road, next to Nailah's Kitchen and Heritage Smokehouse - into a "multimodal space that can be shut down and can have markets and fairs, can have a safe walkway for students coming from Govans Elementary. So we're having art, all kinds of pedestrian resources, tables and chairs and things like that."
They also just got site control of a small triangular plot of land where Bellona meets York that they plan to develop into a park space, with outdoor recreation space, a modular pop-up retail space, and concrete steps for a small ampitheater-like area, said Storey.
The project already has some contributions from Loyola, and from Maryland Housing and Community Development.
"It's going to be like a really beautiful, imaginative, arts-filled space," Storey said - and added that they're making sure to have equitable representation from communities on both sides of York Road, to "reimagine a lot of our public spaces that just seem like a forgotten road or a dangerous thoroughfare"
Everyone should be able to feel safe and welcomed into every part of our community.
Part of the work includes improving safety and security. The York Road Improvement District is bringing in new lighting, improved visibility, four armed security guards and Safe Streets representatives for the Music & Arts Festival.
"We are taking a zero tolerance policy to any violence of any kind," said Storey.
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