Maryland Daily Photo Every Week Day a New Picture from MD

In contrast to the 8 hours of beautiful sunshine that there were on Saturday, the time spent photographing the reservoir was the one hour of cloudines in the whole day.   Theres a building in the background about dead center.  Does anyone know what that is? 

 Note The zoomed in buildings are now right here:

One of my first memories of Baltimore County involves travelling over this bridge and its sister bridge on Warren Rd.  You might be able to see from this picture that the bridge deck is composed entirely of diamond pattern steel griding, which while enabling road dirt, water, and whatever else to flow down without the use of gutters, makes a distinct low pitch grrrrrr noise as you drive over it.   This early memory, which I am still talking about, involves a discussion between my mother and everyone else in the car over weather driving over this bridge makes you feel like the car is slipping.  The bridge, as you can tell, has been replaced by a new bridge, which supposedly requires no paint at all!   You can see it to the right.  

Having been replaced, the bridge is still standing, but unused.  Apparently they made a decision (I don’t know who “they” are) to maintain the bridge as a landmark.   This is why it is sporting a new coat of paint in the picture.

  They have also placed little information placards on the sides of the bridge, which is why I can tell you that it is actually modeled after (You didn’t think I’d go a week without a train reference, did you?) the Hell’s Gate bridge in New York City.   Those who know that bridge, know it is one of the most iconic railroad bridges in the World. 

Some more fun trivia about the bridge that I’ve learned from the placard:  Those lanterns on the top are purely decorative and have never functioned.  Most shocking to me, plainly obvious from this picture, but tremendously difficult to see when racing over the bridge at 40 MPH, is the fact that the Seal of the City of Baltimore is right there in the middle of the bridge.  

This bridge crosses the gunpowder falls, just north of the area that is considered to be Loch Raven Reservoir.   Another interesting piece of trivia from this area, is that it was home to the first bridge to cross the gunpowder falls.  That bridge was burned by confederate soldiers in an attempt to cut off the Capital from the rest of the Union. 

Perched in a nest of mystery, looking out over the valley and keeping track of what’s happening at the “Town Center” in Hunt Valley, is the Masonic home.   On the former Bonnie Blink farm and estate grounds.  I know relatively litttle about this place, other than that it was built in the 30′s and that it has one of the best views imaginable for the area.  (yes, that means a view of both the landfill and the quarry)  I do know that, according to the signs, I’m not allowed there. 

Its gothic architecture is certainly a bit unusual for the area.

When I told people I was going to the Loch Raven Reservoir to take some pictures, the general response was: “Don’t fall in this time.”  So I did listen and did not fall into the reservoir this time around.  

For those who are unfamiliar with Loch Raven Reservoir, it is one of three reservoirs in Baltimore County, all three of which are owned by the Baltimore City.   What you are looking at is only a small part of the 23 Billion gallons of water that the reservoir can hold.   (while Prettyboy reservoir can hold a roughly equal amount of water, Liberty reservoir can hold nearly double that capacity. 

When the reservoir’s dam was built in 1914 ( only to be enlarged within a decade) it caused the town of Warren to be completely flooded.  In fact, the town of warren was a serious point of contention during the planning phase of the reservoir.   I’ll leave the history of the town of Warren for a future post when I have better accompanying visual aids.    

In anycase, water from this reservoir is sent directly through a tunnel to lake Montebello in the city, which around the late 19th century had become a defacto reservoir.   From lake Montebello and its sister reservoir/filtration station in Druid hill, water is pumped or gravity fed to the system.   If you are following on a map, you might be saying that its weird for water to go all the way from the reservoir to the city and then back north to customers.  Well that is weird, and that’s why most of the homes in the area surrounding the reservoir use wells and receive no public water supply.   Here’s a map

One more fact for you, which is something I didn’t know until just about 5 minutes ago.  Apparently, there is an emergency conduit that can pump 150 million gallons from the susquehanna river all the way to Baltimore in case of severe drought.