It seemed like a good idea at the time — take a fetid waterway, thick with bacteria and sewage runoff, bury it under a vibrant neighborhood and cover it with concrete.

The waterway was such a toxic cesspool that the master of ceremonies at the project’s 1915 dedication, Henry Barton Jacobs, declared he was seeking to “bury the Jones Falls River — not to praise it.”

By the early 1960s, the Jones Falls Expressway, or JFX, had been built over the hidden river.

Now, many Baltimoreans remain curious about the 2-mile stretch of buried river and wonder why it was covered all those years ago. People can walk along trails on both sides of the tunneled section, and curiosity has prompted some to brave the graffiti-covered conduit in search of the lost river, which runs from just upstream of Penn Station to just north of East Lombard Street.

Some urban advocates have talked about “daylighting” the buried waterway and restoring its natural surroundings.

Alice Volpitta, lead water-quality scientist at Blue Water Baltimore, said reimagining the fate of the Jones Falls is an exciting concept. The nonprofit, which works to ensure Baltimore has safe waterways, is supportive of efforts to start that conversation.

“It’s a project 20 or more years ahead of us, but the work to restore the Jones Falls has been happening for decades,” Volpitta said. She said it is important to engage everyone who would be affected — from JFX commuters to would-be anglers — early on.

A (smelly) river runs through it

So why did city leaders bury the river? Part of the answer is that rivers in cities were not always nice places to walk along and enjoy.

Flooding along the waterway had been an issue since David Jones, its namesake, settled along the river in 1661. Both Jonestown and another early settlement, Old Town, saw extensive flooding.

A 1786 flood took out bridges and stores, causing several people to drown, according to a Baltimore Sun article published in 1991. In 1837, the article noted, the Jones Falls River rose 20 feet above its banks, leaving 19 dead and filling the waterway with so much raw sewage that Baltimore had the highest rate of bacterial disease spread through contaminated food and water of any city in the country at the time.

Another Sun article noted the severity of an 1868 flood caused by a severe storm and high tide at the Inner Harbor; it claimed the lives of 50 people and damaged about 2,000 homes.

“The flooding constantly caused the Jones Falls to change direction every time,” said Ronald Parks, a retired city public works employee of some 37 years who wrote the book “Baltimore’s Water Supply History.” “And then [the city] said, ‘We’ve got to stop this,’ because people were building houses, losing their cattle, cows and pigs. … Everything was getting wiped out.”

As bad as the flooding was, some considered the smell worse. Raw sewage from homes, as well as industrial discharges from mills and other industry along the Jones Falls, flowed into the river and then the harbor.

The Jones Falls, “running through the heart of the city, had become a foul, open sewer, and the harbor had become a menace to the health, and a stench in the nostrils, of the people, and a place, like the dead sea, where nothing living could exist,” then-Baltimore Mayor James Preston wrote in an October 1918 message to City Council.

But by then change was on the way.

After the Great Baltimore Fire, voters in 1905 approved a plan to create a modern system that separated storm and sanitary sewers. The city also started work on a $1.6 million conduit system to direct the Jones Falls River underground and cover it with a thoroughfare, The Fallsway.

The conduit consists of a 21-foot-wide tunnel for the river and three large concrete tubes built into what was the riverbed.

Members of the city’s engineering society gathered at the 1915 dedication before setting off dynamite that diverted the lower Jones Falls into the tunnel.

What lies beneath

Today, the Jones Falls begins as a small stream in Baltimore County near Garrison, passes through Lake Roland near the city line, and winds its way through North and Central Baltimore. The 18-mile-long waterway becomes a small river after it exits Lake Roland.

Near Penn Station, the river enters the Jones Falls Conduit and flows underground until around East Fayette Street, where Interstate 83 ends. It then comes back into public view, flowing for several more blocks before emptying into the Inner Harbor, near the Pier 6 Pavilion. Residents and tourists stroll along its brick paths.

Mount Vernon resident Liv Garahan collects historical postcards of Baltimore to help her learn about what she says was once “one of the greatest American cities.”

“We have this highway that cuts through the neighborhood that I live in, so I think about the Jones Falls a lot,” she said.

One of her postcards shows the river flowing past Penn Station on the north side and Baltimore’s Mount Royal Terrace Gardens on the south bank, with pathways through plantings of trees, shrubs and flowers. Another includes a caption that “proudly” notes the completion of the Jones Falls Expressway in 1962.

Stanley Kemp, a University of Baltimore ecologist, said people at the time were happy to see the 2 miles of river buried. City leaders toasted their achievement at a white-cloth dinner in the newly built tunnel.

“I would say one of the main driving forces was to build this system … to stop those floods from happening. But the other thing to combat was the massive pollution,” Kemp said. “And, if you think it’s bad today, it’s nothing compared to what it was in the 19th century.”

Many urbanists and others have advocated on social media for daylighting more of the Jones Falls River, citing the success of a project in Seoul, South Korea. Daylighting involves exposing all or part of a covered river or stream.

“With a galvanized, united front and with the aid of several environmental organizations, I hope that — actually, I believe that — the [Jones Falls River] will be daylighted, seen, and enjoyed by the Baltimore community,” Allison Klei, then a student at Franklin & Marshall College, wrote in a 2021 study posted on the website Planet Forward.

But Kemp says it would be difficult to fully restore the hidden section, given that the area has been filled in with development and an expressway.

Many people don’t even notice the sections of the river that are out in the open today, he said.

“I’ve had students who live in Hampden, and when I take them down to Falls Road to take samples and stuff, they say to me, ‘I didn’t even know that this was down here,’” Kemp said.

Though the Jones Falls’ environmental problems are not as severe as they once were, Kemp said, the water remains contaminated.

In September, the Maryland Department of the Environment reached a $1.1 million settlement with Fleischmann’s Vinegar over water pollution violations from the company’s Baltimore facility. This followed a fish kill and other water-quality issues in the waterway near the plant.

Baltimore’s harbor received a C grade for water quality based on 2023 water sampling, according to the Waterfront Partnership. The group is trying to promote greater public use of the basin and last year held an inaugural Harbor Splash.

And Kemp said he and students have found more than 12 species of fish, eels and lots of insects live there — plus, migratory fish that live in there seasonally.

“Nature is very resilient. There’s a lot of things that live in the Jones Falls, and it’s probably more dangerous to us than it is to them,” Kemp said. “People are easy to despair about urban waterways and stuff, but we’ve made a lot of progress and we need to continue to just take little baby steps.”