Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the Inner Harbor, Silo Point—over the past 40 years Baltimore has witnessed a number of municipal government and corporate economic development partnerships create long-lasting impressions on the city’s landscape and cultural life. Not all of them, however, have produced such illustrious thumbprints. Some have, from the very start, faced contentious community opposition. Some, from the moment construction began, were already problematic in the planning stage. And some get started before gaining community support and implode before completion, remaining ambitious failures on an epic scale. And in Baltimore, perhaps no single project is more of an epic fail than the attempt to connect Interstate 95 with I-70, construction on which halted in the 1970s, leaving behind a 1.4-mile stretch of divided highway from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to the West Baltimore MARC train station that permanently cleaved a predominately African-American community in two. To those of us who arrived in Baltimore after its construction, there was never a time before. For all we know, Baltimore has always had that pointless “Highway to Nowhere.”

“We chose the Highway to Nowhere because when I [started working on] my thesis, it was the safest place you could actually be all day long,” says local artist and community organizer Ashley Milburn. “There was absolutely nobody on the green spaces on the highway. There’s, like, 52 acres of downtown park-like green spaces with no one on it. So the idea of putting a huge national festival on that spot—and Alternate Roots was crazy enough to even think about it—was just outrageous.”

He’s talking about Roots Fest 2011, a national conference and festival that kicks off tonight with panel discussions and presentations and culminates this weekend in two days of free, outdoor music and arts featuring New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson, contemporary soul man Anthony David, go-go godfather Chuck Brown, and hip-hop truth teller Talib Kweli—all taking place on the Highway to Nowhere at Franklin and North Gilmor streets. It’s a crowd-pleasing, family-friendly lineup of artists and activities designed to bring people to West Baltimore to have a good time. But for the festival organizers, it’s an opportunity to spotlight the human and cultural resources of a community that has been undervalued—and undervalued itself—thanks to decades of poor systemic urban planning and policy, and an attempt to find creative cultural strategies to succeed in revitalization where traditional models of private/public partnerships have not.

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