With Ghost Rivers, the designer Bruce Willen calls attention to Baltimore’s buried streams.

By Timothy A. Schuler

 “What would a monument to [a] river look like?” This was the question that Bruce Willen asked himself in the summer of 2020. The artist and founder of Baltimore’s Public Mechanics design studio was, like a lot of people during the pandemic, spending an unusual amount of time outside, and one day he heard water running below the street. It jogged a memory of a historic map and a river called the Sumwalt Run that no longer existed. “There was a lot of conversation about monuments going on, and I was thinking about, how do you not just memorialize an event or person but a place?” Willen says. 

That question now has an answer. Ghost Rivers is a permanent public art installation that visualizes the now-buried waterway known as Sumwalt Run, a tributary of Baltimore’s Jones Falls that was encapsulated in the city’s storm-sewer pipe in the early 20th century. Installed in multiple locations throughout the city’s Remington neighborhood—the first nine opened in October 2023; another three are planned for 2024—the artwork consists of a meandering blue stripe that traces the river’s original path. Adjacent signage in the same powder blue interprets various aspects of the stream’s history, including memories shared by area residents with Willen over a two-year engagement period.

Funded in part through the Gutierrez Memorial Fund, the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority, and the Chesapeake Bay Trust, the multisite aspect of the installation hints at the contiguous nature of the original waterway, the recurring visual element of the wavy blue stripe becoming an insistent new layer in the urban fabric. “Someone walking through the neighborhood might not stop and look at it [the first time], but once you’ve encountered it two or three times, then you might be curious to look at the signage,” Willen says. “So it had to be something that would be really recognizable, but I didn’t want to do something that was going to be too visually loud.”

In calling attention to the city’s altered hydrology, Willen hopes to contribute to a larger conversation about humans’ relationship to the natural world. “There’s this reevaluation of human-made systems,” he says, “where we are starting to reevaluate [our] relationship with nature and not thinking of ourselves as separated from these natural systems but living alongside and being part of the system ourselves.”