Gwynns Falls Leakin Park


The adjoining Gwynns Falls Park and Leakin Park, in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, generally referred to as "Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park," covers of contiguous parkland, forming the most extensive park in the city. Gwynns Falls-Leakin Park situated along the Gwynns Falls stream, through the western side of Baltimore City and suburban Baltimore County, which eventually flows into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, The combined / joint parks are a protected wilderness area, heavily forested and largely left in its natural state, somewhat like Herring Run in the northeast section of the city, but unlike other large urban parks in Baltimore city such as Druid Hill or Patterson Parks, which have some tree cover, with open meadows and mowed lawns in between. Baltimore's City Department of Recreation and Parks operates Gwynns Falls and Leakin as a single park, beginning at the western edge of the city, following the Gwynns Falls stream from Windsor Mill Road to Wilkens Avenue.
Franklintown Road serves as the main vehicular route through the park, as a continuation of Dogwood Road from the Baltimore County suburb of Woodlawn. It exits the park near West Lafayette Avenue further into the city.
Although surrounded by an urban environment, some areas of the park are so heavily wooded that they give the impression of wilderness. Portions of the 1999 horror film The Blair Witch Project were filmed here. The combination of its many secluded areas and easy vehicular access gave it a reputation, in Baltimore and beyond, as a place of crime in the past. In the early 2010s the park began efforts to improve its public image by barricading many dead-end access roads and publicizing family-friendly events.

History

Gwynns Falls Park

The properties which eventually became Gwynns Falls Park started with a small parcel of land southwest of Edmondson Avenue, selected by the Baltimore City government in 1901 to serve as a park, anticipating the needs of a growing population. In their plan for the "Greater Baltimore Public Grounds," prepared for the Baltimore Municipal Arts Society in 1904, the Olmsted Brothers recommended acquiring land along the Gwynns Falls for a stream valley park.
Gwynns Falls Park was established by the City of Baltimore in 1908 with the addition of other properties to the land purchased in 1901.
In the 1960s, federal, state and city transportation planners proposed routing Interstate 70 through the Gwynns Falls Valley and the Park. The eastbound interstate was to continue from its current eastern terminus at the Security Boulevard/Cooks Lane interchange and run towards an intersection with Interstate 95, which runs from the northeast to southwest through the city; a spur route, Interstate 170, was to begin there, and serve downtown via the neighborhoods immediately west of it. This extension was canceled officially in the early 1980s due to heavy sustained local opposition, and the I-70 designation itself was truncated to the Baltimore Beltway in 2014.

Leakin Park

A bequest from J. Wilson Leakin in 1922 provided funding for a 300-acre addition to the park, purchased as two parcels in 1941 and 1948 from the descendants of Thomas de Kay Winans. A stipulation of the bequest required the city to name this portion of the park for Leakin's grandfather, Shepard A. Leakin, a former mayor.
The property purchased from the Winans family was previously known as the Crimea. Thomas Winans named his Baltimore property after the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. In 1856, Winans built a villa on the property, which he called the Orianda House. His villa continues to stand in Leakin Park, at 1901 Eagle Drive.
The parks are included in the Baltimore National Heritage Area.

Pipeline plans

Plans to build a two-mile-long gas pipeline through a heavily wooded section of the park were questioned by the Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park organization in September 2013. The pipeline will replace an aging pipeline originally installed in 1949 along Dead Run, a tributary of Gwynns Falls.
Initially, Baltimore Gas & Electric Company planned a replacement line running mostly along the park's southern border. An alternative suggestion would move more of the line to the southern border at the neighborhood of West Hills. Either route will require extensive clearing of trees that are more than 100 years old, because the new pipeline requires a 40-foot wide access corridor to be kept clear of trees.
Running the pipeline along the existing route would involve a serious environmental impact, due to its proximity to Dead Run. This alternative also involves extensive clearing, because the new pipe must be located at least 75 feet from the old line to satisfy safety requirements. The access corridor along the old pipeline is only 26 feet wide.

Notable features

At the end of the 20th century, Leakin Park had a negative reputation connected with crime. It was nicknamed "the city's largest unregistered graveyard." A webpage was created to track victims found in the park.
This aspect of the park has been referenced in works of popular culture set in Baltimore. In an episode of The Wire, a police detective recalls checking the park for a body earlier in his career and being told only to care about ones that fit the victim's description. "We're looking for one body in particular—if you go grabbing every one you see, we'll be here all day," he recounts being told. In its first season, the podcast Serial investigated the death of Hae Min Lee, found in the park in 1999.
One of the bodies to be found in the park is that of Eugene Leroy Anderson, a local 20-year-old whose skeletal remains were found off Stokes Drive in October 1969. It was believed that his fellow Black Panthers had tortured and killed him that spring after discovering he was an FBI informant. However, when four other Panthers were prosecuted for the crime in 1971, witnesses who had been informants themselves gave inconsistent accounts of how the crime took place. Only one defendant was convicted, later pardoned by Governor Marvin Mandel. The crime remains officially unsolved.
Several factors made Leakin attractive to criminals disposing of bodies. It borders on Edmondson and Walbrook, two high-crime neighborhoods of the city. Franklintown and Windsor Mills roads, which cross the park, are "easy thoroughfares to get in and out of a secluded area after illegal acts" in the words of Rona Kobell, a former Sun reporter writing in Slate. And many short dead-end roads entered the park from the surrounding neighborhoods.
A park planner, Molly Gallant, led successful efforts to change the park's reputation after a community based 2011 campout in the park. She, along with volunteers, began closing off the access roads to discourage illicit behavior. A bike trail around the park's perimeter has also made a significant, positive impact and now welcomes cyclists and hikers from around the city. In regard to the park's reputation of the past, Kobell says,