Some weeks ago I read a most interesting article in a national
magazine, Industrial Development and Manufacturers Record, about
this southern end of the vast super-city that—as planners and others
keep reminding us—extends from Boston to Washington.
I should like to quote from a foreword to that article:
"Astronomers have recently discovered, " it says, "that many a large
star previously thought to be a single body is actually a pair of stars
revolving around each other. We will not speculate on the origin
of this phenomenon, but we do know something about an earthly
counterpart. "
The earthly counterpart referred to was the cities of Washington
and Baltimore and their surrounding areas.
To go on with the quotation:
"Baltimore and Washington, " it says, "started out with completely
independent existences but have grown so big that they exert an ex-
tremely strong magnetic attraction on each other. "
The author of the piece had flown over the area at night, just as
most of us here have, I suspect, and he was deeply moved by the
panorama that spread out before his eyes. "Midway between Baltimore
and Washington, " he writes, "you can look down and see practically
all of both cities spread out before you. The centers of the two great
masses of light are about 40 miles apart, but the straggling lights on
their outskirts are already intertwined. "
This aerial picture of the intertwining lights in an accurate overall
picture of the interrelationship of the two metropolitan areas, but an
examination of the details affords an even better opportunity to under-
stand these twin stars among cities and the gravitational force they
exert upon one another. It is true, as this author suggests, that until
comparatively recently Washington and Baltimore were inclined to
ignore one another, emphasizing their dissimilarities, frequently with
some contempt, and giving little recognition to the fact that they were
in many respects interdependent and complementary. But all of that
changed when the massive growth of the federal government caused
the national capital to overspill the boundaries of the District of Co-
lumbia and spread out into the surrounding areas of Maryland and
Virginia.
Already the Bureau of the Census unites Baltimore, Anne Arundel,
Howard and Carroll Counties with Baltimore City into the Baltimore
metropolitan area, with a population in 1960 of more than 1, 700, 000.
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