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It’s been five months since Fells Point dusted off its “Fells Point Al Fresco” series of outdoor dining nights from last summer and turned it into a daily program to help the historic waterfront neighborhood in Southeast Baltimore and its restaurants and businesses survive the economic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That program, which consists of closing portions of two of the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares, Thames Street and South Broadway, off to automotive traffic and installing parklets for dining, has shown considerable success. It allowed bars and restaurants to more safely open back up before the State of Maryland or Baltimore City allowed indoor dining to resume and it’s added business for those bars and restaurants who would otherwise have been more constrained by indoor dining capacity limits.

It’s also encouraged customers to patronize local businesses and restaurants and provided a welcome break from traffic for area residents. It’s even inspired similar experiments in neighborhoods all over the city.

At the same time, Fells Point Al Fresco has also drawn its fair share of mixed feelings and even some mild backlash over concerns about access to parking, changes in street closure boundaries, communication, and community input. Many of these issues, have drawn differing reactions from retail businesses than they have from bar or restaurant owners or from other neighborhood residents. But in a neighborhood where many of those lines frequently blur, COVID cases rise, and with winter further complicating outdoor dining, how these issues are addressed could go a long way towards determining how programs like Fells Point’s move forward and what those neighborhoods prioritize.

The parklet and parking predicament

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the issues currently sparking discussion in Fells Point involve parking. For example, Gail Furman, co-owner of a neighborhood mainstay, Max’s Taphouse on South Broadway, freely credits outdoor dining and the parklets with helping to keep her business afloat during the pandemic. “It’s certainly helped us as far as business is concerned because (aside from Baltimore Ravens game days), we haven’t opened indoors yet so it’s been a great help,” Furman said. “…One of the negatives would be that we do a lot of carryout business and it’s been difficult when the roads are closed down for customers to get to our place.”

That complaint was also echoed by Nick Johnson, the owner of Su Casa, a furniture store on South Bond St., technically just outside the area cut off by the street closures, and like many neighborhood business owners, himself a resident of Fells Point.

Johnson said that while community support for his store has been strong, he can only rely so much on immediately local business and does think that more customers being able to drive in from the nearby waterfront neighborhoods of Canton, to the east, and Federal Hill, to the west, would help. He also said that his store’s location in a de facto “cul-de-sac” just outside the closure zones made curbside pickup for his customers “practically impossible.”

At the same time, without retail traffic counters installed in Su Casa and several other Fells Point retail businesses and with Fells Point so readily accessible from its surrounding neighborhoods by bus, bike, scooter, or even just by foot, it can be hard to determine how much of the impact on local businesses is attributable to the road closures as opposed to other factors like the pandemic itself, especially since the pandemic has also been a factor in businesses like Su Casa and its neighbor across the street, the surf-inspired clothing boutique Fells Point Surf Co., cutting back their hours. (To say nothing of the assumptions about equity some of these parking arguments overlook, not a small thing in a neighborhood fairly well ensconced within the “White L” which divides certain Baltimore neighborhoods from the adjoining “Black Butterfly” along largely race and class-based lines).

Furthermore, other business owners say the parking problem has been somewhat more seasonal in nature. “What I’ve noticed is that in the spring, into the summer, and into early fall, it wasn’t an issue,” said Patrick Russell, who owns several bars and restaurants in the Baltimore area, including three in Fells Point: Kooper’s Tavern and Sláinte Irish Pub and Restaurant on Thames St. and Woody’s Cantina on S. Broadway, as well as being one of the outdoor dining program’s earliest and most fervent organizers and supporters. “People were walking more and there was a lot of foot traffic. But Fells Point, in particular, every year this time of year, you don’t get a lot of foot traffic on the week.”

One thing residents, bar/restaurant owners, and retailers alike do seem to agree on is that it’s been a struggle to get visitors to Fells Point to use the surfeit of spaces provided by the multiple parking garages in and around the neighborhood instead of the narrow residential side streets neighborhood denizens themselves usually rely on for parking.

“As the insides of restaurants have increased capacity”, said Kimberly Stanbro of the Fell’s Point Residents Association (FPRA) (admittedly before the current spike in COVID-19 cases caused Baltimore City to reduce capacity again), “it doesn’t look like outdoor dining is decreasing. So it’s taken over 300 parking spaces that used to be for these diners to come in and park and use the area. Where do you think they’re parking? It’s not in the garage…”

Consequently, Stanbro said that the FPRA, the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, and city agencies like the Baltimore City DOT (Department of Transportation) have started putting signage out trying to lead diners to the Caroline Street Garage, a point echoed by one of the outdoor dining program’s biggest proponents, Maryland State Delegate Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore City), who represents Fells Point and much of the rest of South Baltimore in Annapolis.

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Business owners ponder their future

Lierman also said that some of the local businesses’ concerns about parking would be addressed by converting the portion of Thames Street between Caroline and Ann Streets into a one-way only westbound thoroughfare for motorists, a change DOT put into place starting on November 7.

In addition, a portion of Thames Street is closed between Ann St. and Broadway each night from 9 pm to 6 am and Lancaster Street is closed nightly between the parking garage just south of the traffic circle at Aliceanna Street and Exeter Street from 4 to 10 pm every evening but both stretches are otherwise open to auto traffic during the day.

Lierman also stressed that most of the feedback about Fells Point Al Fresco has been largely positive. “It’s more pleasant to walk around,” Lierman said, comparing Fells Point to how it was before the street closures started.

One thing both Russell and Stanbro cited as a potential improvement for Fells Point Al Fresco is adding a greater degree of standardization to the various parklets restaurants and bars are putting out on the streets.

Russell said one of the early strengths of the outdoor dining program was the thematic consistency of the parklets put up by restaurant owners like himself and by Bryce Turner, the Baltimore architect who’s helped shape much of the program.

“Everyone started to get involved in it and in the beginning, went along with the theme,” Russell said. “So it really looked nice in the neighborhood. Since then, some people have really kind of gone against the grain a little bit and been a little different in the way that the theme looks, it’s not necessarily what you would consider consistent.”

“There’s kind of a hodgepodge thing going on in Fells Point,” Stanbro said, explaining the problem a little further. “And a lot of the residents wish that there had been some sort of theme or something that would pull it all together. You’ve got a lot of pallets and outside seating that looks like people just threw whatever they could together, just to have lots of outside seating, next to places that look like they put a lot of work in on it and it’s just not a consistent theme throughout and not really good for the aesthetic.”

Still with COVID-19 cases once again spiking all over the country, including Baltimore City, where, as of November 16, Fells Point’s ZIP code had a 5.4% positivity rate over the preceding 28 days, City restaurants reducing their capacity to 25%, and bars that don’t serve food being forced to temporarily close down, there seems to be little chance outdoor dining will leave Fells Point or any other corner of Baltimore City any time soon.

Instead, while issues like purchasing heat lamps and how much ventilation must be added to dining tents to keep them safe will become more and more pertinent over the coming months, Russell said that even when given the chance to dine inside, customers, both inside and outside Fells Point, just aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity enough to make ends meet for bar and restaurant owners, a trend he’s noticed since well before state and local officials started rolling back indoor capacity.

“We did not see a lot of inside dining when we went from 0 (% inside capacity allowed) to 25 to 50 to 75, back to 50, (and) down to 25,” Russell said. “We haven’t seen a lot of inside dining, we just haven’t seen it. A lot of people are still reluctant to go inside and if they have the option to sit outside, they will.”

Alex Holt is a New York state native, Maryland transplant, and freelance writer. He lives in Mt. Washington in Baltimore and enjoys geeking out about all things transit, sports, politics, and comics, not necessarily in that order. He was formerly GGWash's Maryland Correspondent.