Month: April 2024

Ghost Rivers of Baltimore

Jason Kingart, baltimore, case study, city, creeks, cultural, design, explorations, maps, places, streamsLeave a Comment on Ghost Rivers of Baltimore

One of the cooler examples of hidden hydrology art in the past year is “Ghost Rivers”, the brainchild of designer and artist Bruce Willen of studio Public Mechanics.

Ghost Rivers (Ghost Rivers)

Envisioned as a “…public art project & walking tour, rediscovering hidden streams and histories that run beneath our feet.” Willen uses traffic striping and signage to highlight multiple sites around the city, particularly Sumwalt Run, a buried creek that “now flows entirely through underground culverts beneath the Remington and Charles Village neighborhoods.”

The site includes some great background, including the history of the streams and their burial, along with some great illustrations of the path as it winds through

Stream burial (Baltimore DPW Archives, Ronald Parks – Ghost Rivers)
Sumwalt Run pipe (Ghost Rivers)

The installation itself is simple, using durable thermoplastic traffic striping in a wavy pattern that allows the line to engage with people in multiple ways and follow curbs and walks – so it is interrupting the linear flow patterns of walkers, cyclists, and driver throughout the city. This allows the eye and the curiosity to wander along these paths and connect the dots.

Images of the meandering blue path in the public realm (Ghost Rivers)

Self-guided walking tours are available and will expand as more sites are included, along with a Google map to track the route and key points. The signs are also simple, but bright and noticeable for those passersby, allowing for a bit of interactivity as they line up with the views of the meanders, and provide some background information and QR codes to scan for more engagement.

Ghost Rivers Sign (Colossal)

The summary statement explains the idea of connecting us with these hidden creeks.

“Below the streets of Baltimore flow dozens of lost streams. These ghost rivers still cascade from their sources, the many natural springs around the city. As the street grid sprawled outward from the harbor, these verdant waterways were buried in concrete tunnels. They now run deep beneath our rowhomes, channeled into the city’s storm sewers, hidden and mostly forgotten. You can sometimes hear their rushing waters echoing up from storm drains.”

The site also includes awesome resources for more information, history, daylighting resources, and other artistic interventions worthy of a follow-up, including a few I’ve posted about in the past and a few new ones. This is a model that is highly replicable in almost any city, using materials that are simple and evocative in unique ways to highlight those subterranean stories and make us reconsider our relationships with the hidden hydrology.

Closeup of Sumwalt Run marker (Ghost Rivers)

The idea is one of the most cohesive and elegant takes on the idea of revealing creeks using blue lines tracking the historical routing of the waterways. It draws upon precedents, mentioned by applying traffic coating, markers, or paint to mark the route of creeks, most similarly artist Sean Derry’s work in Indianapolis ‘Charting Pogue’s Run” and Henk Hostra’s “The Blue Road” in Drachten, The Netherlands, the proposed “Ghost Arroyos” in San Francisco. Another art-based example from Baltimore is the “Green Alley” street painting, and more loose, ephemeral versions in the St. George Rainway in Vancouver, B.C., in São Paulo, Brazil as part of the Rios a Ruas project, Stacy Levy’s Stream Sketches in New York City.

There are lots of examples of this type of project, and it is interesting to see the different ways a simple blue line can be used to engage in revealing historical layers. So let me know if you have other favorites you’ve seen.

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Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 04/29/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/23/25.

Exploring Canada’s Buried Rivers

Jason Kingcreeks, daylighting, history, maps, montreal, places, streams, toronto, vancouverLeave a Comment on Exploring Canada’s Buried Rivers

A recent CBC News interactive “Buried rivers flow under Canadian cities, hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels and sewer pipes. Will we revive them or let the waterways fade from memory?” (April 3, 2024) provides a deep dive and great graphics and maps for hidden hydrology in three cities, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Jaela Benstien and Emily Chung do a great job of highlighting both the timeline of urban stream disappearance and some of the ways the streams are coming back to life.

The narrative of disappearance mirrors many other cities, including pollution and diseases like cholera and typhoid turning waterways from amenities to dangers. Encasement in pipes became a way to remove the sources from contact and also opened up future land for development.

Images of sewer construction in Montreal’s Saint-Pierre River in the 1930s (Archives de la Ville de Montréal – via CBC)

The article explores particular creeks in Toronto including Mud Creek, where Helen Mills, founder of Lost Rivers, gives a tour of the remnants and traces of the urban waterway. It also discusses Taddle Creek which provides one of those dramatic before-and-after visuals we all dream of when envisioning the hidden hydrology in the modern context.

Taddle Creek near Toronto University, in 1861 (uc.utoronto.ca/public domain/CBC)
The same view in 2023 (Emily Chung/CBC)

The methods we used to show lost rivers are worth more exploration here, and the news interactive does a great job of using a scrolling format and some oblique aerial maps of the three cities, such as Toronto below.

Image of Toronto’s Lost Rivers (CBC)

The interactive aspect allows for more context for places, such as the route of Mud Creek through the Evergreen Brick Works, using a revealing overlay w/ aerial imagery with powerful effect.

Overlay of Mud Creek in the Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto (CBC)

The story similarly looks at both Montreal and Vancouver in-depth, so check out the full exploration. For some added context, I previously covered some of the Canadian cities in some depth with Vancouver’s Secret Waterways (November 2016) and Toronto’s Lost Rivers (July 2017), and also a more in-depth discussion of the great documentary Lost Rivers (November 2016).

There’s a focus on daylighting, and they include Luna Khirfan, a professor of planning at the University of Waterloo who has done extensive research on stream daylighting projects around the globe. She mentions other cities around the world that are doing work on daylighting and restoration of urban creeks, such as Zurich, Switzerland, Seoul, South Korea, Berkeley, California, and Yonkers, New York, which we will cover in more depth in the future posts.

The imagery emphasizes the constrained conditions of some of the waterways that were not buried and still exist in daylight, but have been channelized at the margins of. This image of Still Creek in Vancouver highlights the conditions of many creeks.

Still Creek in Vancouver, BC (Ben Nelms/CBC)

Even in a constrained condition, there are benefits to the visible creeks, in terms of cooling, habitat, and biophilic connections to water and nature. The story also makes the key connection between these lost rivers and contemporary climate change issues like flooding and urban heat islands. As noted:

“Climate change and urbanization are heating and flooding our cities. Restoring buried waterways — and their riverbanks — could be one answer to many problems: cooling heat islands, absorbing carbon dioxide, cleaning the air, reducing flooding and providing a habitat for wildlife and native plants.”

The story is engaging and informative, and more cities deserve that deep dive into the history and potential for exploration of hidden hydrology and potential daylighting and restoration. I also do appreciate the link to my Hidden Hydrology site for more info!

As a companion piece to the news interactive, the CBC podcast What on Earth with Laura Lynch from April 14, 2024 “Buried under cities, rivers are a climate wonder in waiting” a 30-minute exploration by Jaela Bernstien (who co-authored the previous story), and Lynch of some of these same topics in audio format, in Montreal’s Saint-Pierre, Toronto’s Mud Creek and Vancouver’s Still Creek. Through discussions with Kregg Hetherington, Amir Taleghani, and Helen Mills, it captures the beauty of hidden hydrology exploration and discovery and highlights the goals of ecosystem restoration and climate change solutions embedded in restoring lost rivers. Luna Khirfan is also part of the dialogue, discussing her work at the University of Waterloo around stream daylighting, the challenges of daylighting, and other world global cities like Zurich that have championed the idea.

Give both the article a read and the podcast a listen and let me know what you think.

Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 04/20/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/20/25.

Tokyo Drift

Jason Kingart, case study, creeks, cultural, explorations, history, language, maps, places, streamsLeave a Comment on Tokyo Drift

The article “Tracing Tokyo’s Hidden Rivers” (The Japan Times, March 2024) was a fascinating dive into hidden hydrology mapping and urban exploration through the lens of Japanese culture and added a new term to my lexicon. The concept of ankyo, 暗渠. which at a basic level translates in English to something akin to “culvert”, “conduit” or “subterranean drain”. These features have been removed from the city’s original landscape, yet still reveal themselves in numerous ways. This is the starting point for Hideo Takayama and Nama Yoshimura, who together started “Ankyo Maniacs”, a group focused on exploring these urban remnants of buried and hidden streams in the City of Tokyo.

Tours of the ankyo reveal waterways flowing under manholes (The Japan Times)

The explorers rely on what they call “ankyo signs”, which include a wide range of markers that help clue us into the hidden hydrology, including place names, objects, and drains (such as shown above) which allow the visual and auditory connections to flowing water. There are also urban remnants such as barriers and old bridges that were previously in place to protect from open waterways but were never removed, or prevent access to areas that have been covered over. More obvious are places focusing on water, including baths, pools, and fishing ponds. The Ankyo Maniacs and others have refocused attention on these liminal spaces, as mentioned in the article:

“While they may be out of our sight, Takayama says water still flows through many ankyo, while others have become part of local drainage systems. “It’s as if they’re telling us, ‘We’re still here,’” he says. “By getting to know them, we can appreciate the past dignity of these rivers.”

The basis for the exploration relies on several maps and the history of Tokyo spans many years. The Tokyo Ankyo Sanpo (Tokyo Ankyo Stroll) map, edited by So Honda, provides the go-to for locals exploring the city with ankyo and other features mapped in detail. Another more modern resource is the Tokyo Jisou, or Time Layer Maps, available as an iPhone and iPad app, which is a map viewer that shows maps of the city at different periods, spanning the Meiji to Heisei Eras from the 1800s to present time.

Images from the Tokyo Jisou Maps – by the Japan Map Center (App Store)

Beyond the specifics of mapping and exploration, the language of hidden hydrology is also fascinating, the Japanese term “ankyo” providing a case study of the hidden poetry of the terms. At a basic level, ankyo describes these places in practical terms, as drains and culverts that work to convey water underground. When you look at the underlying meaning of the characters, it hints at ideas like ‘darkness, shade, disappearance’ which allude to the more mysterious nature of the network of underground features that compel us to explore. The Tokyo Ankyo Sanpo map mentioned previously also includes the opposite features “kaikyo” 海峡, which are the still-visible open channels, evoking lighter ideas like ‘cheerful, pleasant, and agreeable’.

An example of one of the tours is found on the Experience Suginami Tokyo site, providing self-guided instructions in the area of Ogikubo Station following the route of the former Momozonogawa River and portions of the Zenpukujigawa River, including “ankyo signs” such as alleys and paths that act as covers to the buried streams, curving walkways mimicking the previous channels, and other hints at the hidden histories underneath.

Ankyo (Culvert) Tour map near Ogikubo station (Experience Suginami Tokyo)

The heart of the process isn’t just about the learning or processing of information, but about the experience. The prompt by the explorers: “Don’t Think. Walk and Feel!” is imbued with ideas about slow time, and the benefits of connecting to places more deliberately. It also connects to larger ideas about experiencing places, observing and connecting to the signs and features of the urban landscape, expressed in the Japanese concept of ‘wabi-sabi’, allowing appreciation of nature, along the way.

The language barrier does limit my full understanding of the content, (including what seems like some great publications) so if any Japanese speakers have more to add, I would love to hear it. For some bonus content, this short video with Takayama and Yoshimura in Tokyo outlines their work exploring the ankyo.

The idea of revealing the locations of hidden places is compelling for all who study hidden hydrology in its many forms. As summed up in the video: “Ankyo hunters say they enjoy the idea that at any moment you could be standing over a piece of forgotten Tokyo.”

Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 04/18/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/18/25.