The Reverberations Crosswalk is a pavement mural that enhances pedestrian safety for children and residents walking to and from Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School while celebrating the school’s art education focus. Located at 26th and St. Paul Streets in central Baltimore, the artistic crosswalk features large scale icons in white representing the arts, love, and beauty, surrounded by reverberating outlines on top of a base layer of angled shapes in eye-catching colors, including turquoise, orange, lime green, and salmon red. The symbols and colors that make up the design are inspired by drawings created by students during a workshop held the school in June 2018. The icons include a crayon, music note, book, paint brush, microphone, heart, and flower.
Graham Projects worked closely with the Friends of Margaret Brent, Live Baltimore, Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School, the Harwood Community Association, the Charles Village Civic Association, and Baltimore City Department of Transportation (DOT) to design, approve, and install the public artwork. In facilitating a community-based design process, Graham Projects co-led a drawing workshop with students to generate visual themes that were integrated into three designs proposed to community members at several public meetings. The Reverberations design was selected based on community feedback and votes tallied.
Graham Projects worked with DOT on designing and installing the safety-enhancing bumpouts on either end of the crosswalk. Bumpouts are sidewalk extensions that slow cars and make it safer for people to cross. In this case, the bumpouts were created by marking off part of the curb lanes as pedestrian space using line striping and flex-posts. The artwork is made with custom colors of federally-specified traffic paint mixed with a traction-enhancing aggregate. The extended bumpout areas and crosswalk filled with iconic, bright crosswalk artwork enhances safety by attracting pedestrians to activate their street crossing and drawing the attention of passing motorists to the pedestrians’ safety needs and right-of-way.
