Happy almost-end-of-week, Baltimore. Today, we’ve got a story below that teases what the University of Maryland BioPark and Wexford Science & Technology have planned for the BioPark’s newest and biggest building yet.
Construction on 4MLK is set to begin next month. When it ends, it will offer an anticipated 160,000 square feet of wet lab space for biomedical companies and entrepreneurs, among other office, flex and event space potential in its eight-story frame.
And that’s not all. There are plans for another adjacent 250,000-square-foot building in Phase II of the project.
This complex will sit at the intersection of MLK Boulevard and Baltimore Street, thus expanding the BioParks’s presence on the veritable borderland between downtown and West Baltimore. And it’s impossible, to talk about university and biomedical expansion in Baltimore without acknowledging the dissonance between each side of this pseudo-frontier.
Do you think that 4MLK is a good thing for that part of Baltimore? Does anything about it risk furthering the metaphorical distance between the city’s haves and have-nots?