The Rebirth of Flag House Courts

Just east of Baltimore’s attractive Inner Harbor, long-time residents are beginning to move back home to a newly built neighborhood, where the despair of slum life has given way to promise and hope. Using a $21.5 million grant through the HOPE VI program, sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the City of Baltimore has resurrected a distressed, 16-square-block community, adjacent to the historic Star- Spangled Banner Flag House museum. Workers are building 338 housing units, laying out 20,000 square feet of new and refurbished retail space, and landscaping common areas.

Over the past three years, KCI has played a critical role with developer Mid-City Urban, LLC, in designing plans for realigning the mixed-use, mixed-income community along the original city grid, while ensuring that new utility systems would work within the existing infrastructure. “When you are working in one of the City’s most historic areas,” explained KCI Project Manager Raymond J. Hopkins, “you have to be very proactive about identifying active and abandoned utilities—sometimes buried in several layers of pavement—and then finding ways to make everything work.”

KCI’s assistant project manager, William F. Crampton, Jr., served for 28 years as engineering supervisor with the City’s Highway Division and understands the project’s complexities. “In one location, we designed plans for replacing two, large conduit trunk lines that provided electricity, emergency communications, and cable TV to the City’s east side, with one parallel system. The conduit had to be threaded over and under existing and proposed water lines, sewer, drainage, and other telephone conduit, but our team, including Senior Designer Matt Sichel, found a way to get the job done without interrupting service.” On another part of the site, plans called for locating an obelisk monument in Lombard Square, directly over a shallow, 40-inch waterline serving the City’s central business district and Inner Harbor. “We didn’t have much room to work with,” said Hopkins, “so we developed a plan that distributed the monument’s load to either side of the pipe, eliminating pressure on the line.”

KCI will continue providing construction administration services for the project, which is scheduled for completion in early 2006.

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