Gateway to a National & Natural Treasure
Imagine having the Grand Canyon in your back yard. Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen thinks we do, or at least a national natural treasure that’s just as impressive. It’s called the Chesapeake Bay.
The Grand Canyon, like Yellowstone, Acadia, and other national parks occupy specific geographic sites that you can draw a boundary around. You can’t do that with the Chesapeake. Sen. Van Hollen proposes that we give the Bay the status and protection of a national park while incorporating existing state parks, heritage sites, and public water access points into what might be called the Chesapeake National Recreational Area, with Annapolis destined to become one of several key gateways.
“Designating a Chesapeake National Recreation Area would give this natural treasure the national recognition it deserves while also driving more federal resources to better protect the Bay and its heritage” Senator Van Hollen said in a written statement. “This also represents an economic opportunity for our state, including our capital, Annapolis, which has played a central role in the Bay’s history and culture.”
And Annapolis is stepping up to shine in its new role as a gateway, beginning with a $50 million revamp of the City Dock. “It’s such an exciting opportunity,” says Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley. “When you think of the Chesapeake Bay, the first city you think of is Annapolis. I love the idea of the Bay being our ‘Grand Canyon.’ Sometimes I have to pinch myself, because I’m the mayor of this city and it’s like a holiday resort. We have a great network of parks and this is just going to be another reason why Annapolis is the best place to live in the country.”
The new City Dock park will have the same amount of green space as one and a half football fields. There will be three flexible plazas that can have around 60 parking spaces or be cleared of cars for events like the boat shows.
While some parking will disappear, there will be a total of about 200 spaces left, including the 50-car lot at 110 Compromise Street. To more than make up for the difference, the old Noah Hillman Parking Garage will be demolished and rebuilt to the tune of about $30 million. That project is slated to be completed before the City Dock renovation begins.
The renovation of the City Dock will be perhaps the most significant change in downtown Annapolis since the Naval Academy started to expand its campus in the early 1900s. The City’s basic design, with circles around the hubs of the State House and St. Anne’s Church and narrow streets radiating from those hubs, was laid out by Royal governor Francis Nicholson in 1694. Annapolis has been confusing visitors ever since.
It’s curious that after the itinerant governor’s stint in Annapolis, Nicholson was assigned to Virginia, where he moved the colonial capital from Jamestown to Williamsburg. There he had a second chance to design a city, and this time, you’ll notice that those streets are mostly wide and the blocks are mostly square and instead of two circles, there are none. Not one.
Dedicating the most desirable couple of waterfront acres to parking automobiles for tourists was not part of Nicholson’s plan for Annapolis. How that came to be is lost in history. Gavin Buckley thinks it’s time for a change.
“I campaigned on a park, not a parking lot at City Dock,” Mayor Buckley says, “I could never understand why we gave the prettiest part of the city to cars. It (the renovation of City Dock) will be the last major civil project in the city and we’re not going to charge the taxpayer to pay for it.”
The estimated $50 million budget to renovate the area and the additional $30 million for the Hillman Garage will be covered by the Resilience Finance Authority established in 2020 by bond bill sponsored by Senator Sarah Elfreth (District 30) and championed by Mayor Gavin Buckley and Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman.
The legislation authorizes counties and municipalities to establish and fund resilience finance authorities that can issue and sell state and local tax-exempt bonds for infrastructure projects like this one. Mayor Buckley is hopeful that additional funds will be forthcoming if President Biden’s infrastructure initiative goes through Congress. This is, he says, a shovel-ready project and one worthy of support.
“Protecting our communities, small businesses, and history has never been so important,” Sen. Elfreth told a reporter from the Annapolis Capital newspaper when the legislation was enacted. “This bill ensures Maryland remains a national leader in preparing ourselves for the impending crisis presented by climate change and sea-level rise.”
“It’s not just about sea level rise,” Mayor Buckley says. “The day-to-day nuisance flooding has had a bad economic impact. When is the next hurricane going to push water up the bay? This initiative will stop that. It would have stopped Isabel; it will treat stormwater and provide something the city will be proud of.”
Nuisance flooding is when the tide rises high enough to disrupt daily activity. This is flooding due to wind, the phase of the moon, or the time of year, and not associated with any storm, so it’s sometimes called “sunny-day flooding” or a “king tide.” In 2017, a study showed that Annapolis businesses suffered between $86,000 and $172,000 that year in lost business due to nuisance flooding at City Dock.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a technical report in 2014 that showed Annapolis as experiencing the greatest increase in average annual nuisance flooding of any U.S. city. While there were only 3.8 days of nuisance flooding between 1957–63, there were 39.3 days of floods between 2007 and 2013, a whopping 925 percent increase. It’s only getting worse. The Union of Concerned Scientists predicted that Annapolis will experience as many as 200 annual flood days by 2030 and 350 annual flood days by 2040.
In 2003, Hurricane Isabel (actually downgraded to a tropical depression by the time it hit here, but you wouldn’t know it if you’d been in it) produced a tidal surge 8.4 feet above mean low tide. Photos show curious bystanders in ankle-deep water at the foot of Main Street and two people kayaking past the restaurants on Dock Street.
Illustrations courtesy City Dock Action Committee
Part of the City Dock will be raised above the level of Isabel, while Susan Campbell Park will remain at its current level and will be prone to flooding. The park, by the way, is not “Susan B. Campbell Park” as in “Susan B. Anthony.” It’s named after the daughter of former Annapolis alderman and mayor pro tem Robert Campbell, a legendary character in his own right.
Next to the park there’s a small grey wood-framed building that looks out of place in red-brick Annapolis. This is the Burtis House, the sole-surviving waterman’s home located on City Dock. In 2017, Annapolis architect Michael Dowling drafted a study released by Historic Annapolis and funded by a grant from the NPS Chesapeake Gateways program to examine ways to preserve, protect, and adaptively reuse the house and pier located at the end of Prince George Street.
From about the Civil War up to World War II, the neighborhood around City Dock was known as “Hell Point.” The houses along what was once Holland Street and Johnson Place were mainly two-story frame dwellings like the Burtis House, and like that one, owned by working-class families, most of whom owed their livelihood to one of the industries along the waterfront: the coal and lumber yards, sawmills, oyster-packing houses, warehouses, steamboat wharfs, and boat houses.
In 1941, the Naval Academy expanded, annexing the properties north of Prince George Street and condemning the existing structures there, both residential and commercial. The athletic field house with its distinctive oversized Quonset-hut-shaped copper roof was completed in 1957.
The Burtis House is all that remains of this era in the maritime heritage of Annapolis, except for the house at the other end of the block on the corner of Craig Street that was built in the 1890s. At that time, Cap’n William H. Burtis worked the water and rented boats from the pier to fishermen hoping to snag a record rockfish and dapper dans wishing to pitch some watery woo to their tootsie-wootsies in the good old summertime.
Wendy O’Sullivan, Superintendent of the National Park Service’s Chesapeake Bay Office, is one of many visionaries in Annapolis who believes this historic structure should be preserved. Her office is working to update and renew the existing 20-year-old Chesapeake Gateways program, which is a watershed-wide, place-based partnership network. They’re in the process of creating a new strategic plan, a new grants program, new branding, a focus on inclusive storytelling and equitable access, and a new Chesapeake Gateways Community initiative starting with helping Annapolis become a Gateway to the Chesapeake.
As part of this initiative, the Gateways staff have been working with the city on creating a cooperative agreement to help fund the re-envisioning the City Dock. “This is one of the things we’re excited to be a part of,” O’Sullivan says. “The piece that we’re engaged in right now is the Burtis House and Wharf, the last surviving waterman’s home on City Dock. We’re moving forward with protecting and preserving it.”
The preservation of the structure will be carried out in stages. “We’re excited to have the funding for the first phase from a Maryland Heritage Areas Authority grant, a state bond and matching dollars from Gateways. We’ll be working with Preservation Maryland and the City to pick it up out of the king tide flood waters.” It will be wrapped with messaging until the rest of the City Dock rises up to the same level, theoretically in the fall of 2024.
“Phase two is starting a thought process of adding on to the Burtis House,” O’Sullivan explains. “What are the opportunities to make the whole area at the end of Prince George Street more useful? Right now, it’s a bit stark. If the Navy is open to start thinking with us about what’s possible there, it would be great. All of Phase two will need a capital campaign to raise the public dollars to achieve the vision for what will be a newly activated space there.” The Chesapeake Conservancy will play a key role in helping to raise the funds for this project as well as others.
Once completed, the Burtis House might serve as one of the official Gateways welcome centers for the Chesapeake National Recreation Area; as an extension of the Annapolis Maritime Museum, which could host visits of historic tall ships and traditional vessels at the docks; or perhaps as new headquarters for the Annapolis Harbormaster.
The Gateways program has already partnered with Historic Annapolis to produce the new interpretive panels around City Dock installed this past year. Robert Clark, president and CEO of Historic Annapolis, explained that the foundation entered into a five-year cooperative agreement with the National Park Service’s Chesapeake Bay Office last year.
“The interpretive panels at Susan Campbell Park celebrate our maritime heritage,” Clark explains. “We’re working with the Gateways staff on several components—reaching out to the community to re-imagine the City dock and preserve the Burtis House, and to work on a master interpretive plan to expand visitor opportunities around City Dock.” The goals of the interpretive plan would be to enhance public access, interpret of the city’s unique cultural and natural resources, and inspire the next generation of conservation stewards.
Clark is excited about the transformation the city’s about to undergo. “In 2022, Historic Annapolis turns 70, and we’re planning giant events,” he says, including parades and new historic exhibits. “The City Dock re-imagining project has a ribbon cutting in September of 2024, and July 4, 2026 (the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) is only 63 months away. The expectation is that this will be a huge draw from a four-hour drive away—that’s five states with 17 million people, so what we have here is an extraordinary combination of things (to celebrate) in our 400-year history.”
The National Park Service is “taking a leadership role,” Clark says. “I think it’s going to create an economic thunderbolt. We’re going to start holding town meetings to keep people informed, to keep them excited and optimistic. People who used to go to Aruba are going to come to Annapolis. Our message for local business people is, ‘get busy and get prepared.’”
Superintendent O’Sullivan agrees that the partnership with Historic Annapolis fits right in with the National Park Service’s priorities of equitable access and inclusive story-telling. “People are going to be thrilled with what HA has brought together,” she says. “The intent of that is to be a starting place for visitors, to get visitors to discover other museums and opportunities as we come out of COVID restrictions. We’re hoping to start later this year on reaching out to other potential Gateways Communities” around the Chesapeake watershed, she explains, but for now, “we’re focused on Annapolis and learning from what we achieve here.”
