Curtis Bay is fed up with a member of the neighborhood. In October, residents gathered at an open Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) hearing to demand that the agency deny an operating permit for a CSX-owned coal storage facility. Residents have lived next to the second-largest coal pier in the country for over a century, with a view of the open-air coal pile across the street from the recreation center. They testified for over three hours to the devastating impact of the coal pier and the health hazards associated with the coal dust that lingers throughout the neighborhood. Decades of lived experience, supported by a study released by MDE, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, demonstrate that MDE’s only option is to deny the permit. Looking at South Baltimore’s history tells us why.

South Baltimore has long been at the receiving end of an MDE policy implemented as the agency navigated a new landscape of environmental regulations in the 1980s. Its goal was not to clean up existing hazardous waste but to contain it and keep it from spreading. While residents of wealthy Baltimore suburbs supported this policy, residents living amid hazardous levels of water and air pollutants felt forgotten.

Hawkins Point was one of these areas. South of Curtis Bay, it developed in the 17th century as rich soils allowed farms to flourish. The community, at various points, was home to a yellow fever quarantine station and a World War I fort, protecting Baltimore from disease and attack. Until the mid-20th century, fruit trees lined the routes children walked to school, and fish and crabs were plentiful in the Patapsco River. Residents attested that Hawkins Point was home to some of the first instances of Black homeownership in Baltimore. Until the 1980s, the neighborhood was home to Black and white families who worked at the numerous industrial facilities in the area.

These industries included W.R. Grace, Glidden, and American Recovery, whose presence catalyzed Hawkins Point’s transition from a farming community to an industrial “neighborhood.” The consequences of this development, from toxic runoff to clouds of acid mist, damaged workers’ lungs, stripped paint from their homes and marked Hawkins Point as Batlimore’s dumping ground. A 1981 proposition to build a second hazardous waste landfill forced residents to ask for a state buyout. The community disappeared by 1983 when decades of industrial development, pollution and waste rendered the area unlivable. Hawkins Point had historically been used as a defensive boundary and was sacrificed to keep Baltimore safe from the toxicity that choked residents while allowing the city to benefit from the income industries brought in.

It was a perfect execution of MDE’s policy: keep the rest of Baltimore safe by piling more waste on an area they deemed irrevocably polluted. For years, residents voiced their concerns about being rendered invisible, claiming the city only considered them when it came time to dump. Today, the area is little more than an industrial wasteland. Many industries and landfills that made life untenable are gone, wiped out by economic downturns and deindustrialization, but the land and air are still so choked with detritus and pollution that people have not returned. Hawkins Point is a reminder of the consequences of prioritizing industry over people and that communities endure in a way that industry cannot.

Curtis Bay has inherited a long legacy from the forgotten communities of Hawkins Point, Fairfield and Wagners Point. They disappeared because Baltimore valued the safety of the wealthier and whiter populations within the city center at the expense of the working-class and Black communities at the margins. Curtis Bay is not just up against coal. It is up against the ghosts of industries that have marked its environment as a sacrifice zone. But this is not just a haunting. It is also the legacy of residents who gave everything to keep their communities. Hawkins Point is a reminder of the choices Baltimore made in the past and a not-so-gentle nudge to fight for the people who have made Curtis Bay their home instead of the companies that threaten to destroy it.

The Maryland Department of the Environment faces a critical decision as to whether Baltimore values the people or the industries that call Curtis Bay home. Coal will not survive indefinitely. Denying the coal facility an operating permit gives Curtis Bay a fighting chance to survive as a community instead of a sacrifice zone.

Larkin Gallup is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University who has researched the history of South Baltimore with the Community of Curtis Bay Association and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust.