In February 2018, Ryan Schroeder fell into the Inner Harbor a few hundred feet from a Barnes & Noble. He struggled in the freezing water for roughly 40 minutes before he died. There was no railing to catch him on the way in, no gate, no fence — nothing between the promenade and the harbor but a low granite curb. His family’s response was a campaign called “Railings for Ryan.” Eight years later, the railings still don’t exist.
This month, a 37-year-old man got into a fight in Harbor East, ended up in the water, and died at the hospital. Here we are again.
That is not a quirk of geography. It is a design choice, made deliberately more than 40 years ago and defended ever since.
When the city rebuilt the waterfront into the promenade we walk today, planners studied European cities with crowded, popular waterfronts and had to decide whether to install railings. They chose not to. Mayor William Donald Schaefer reportedly worried that people would climb up and sit on railings, and that this was somehow riskier than an open edge. What the city built instead were granite curbs, light poles and bollards — what officials at the time literally called “psychological barriers.” Nudges. Suggestions. Nothing that would actually stop a person, a child, a wheelchair or a stumbling drunk from going straight into the water.
Forty-plus years later, the bill for that decision keeps coming due. As of the last public count, in 2019, more than 50 bodies had been pulled from the Inner Harbor since 2000 — a tally that has almost certainly grown since. A young girl who used a wheelchair rolled into the water and drowned in 1982; her family sued the city for $20 million and settled out of court, but no railings followed. A blind man nearly died there two years later. Evan Curbeam, 29, was found dead near Fells Point in 2013; his father publicly criticized the city’s inaction the following year. Schroeder died the way described above in February 2018. A year after that, 25-year-old Alexandra Carroll’s body was recovered near the Maryland Science Center. This April, Branson Oduor, 27, went missing after a night out in Fells Point and turned up in the harbor more than a week later, prompting a petition that gathered over 2,200 signatures within days.
Every one of these deaths has produced the same script. Grieving families demand change. A council member says something can’t be allowed to happen again. The city studies the problem and eventually installs a few more ladders and a few more life rings — genuinely useful, and genuinely insufficient. Nobody installs a railing. The cycle resets and waits for the next name.
The case against railings hasn’t changed much since 1980, either. Architect Klaus Philipsen, who has practiced in Baltimore for more than 30 years, has raised real design constraints: A fence would need gaps for boats to dock, would have to meet building code and could obstruct the harbor views that make the promenade worth visiting in the first place. These are real constraints. They are not reasons to do nothing.
Chicago solved the identical problem along its Riverwalk — a mile-plus of downtown waterfront that runs stainless-steel safety railings the length of the walkway while still leaving room for tour-boat docks, water taxis and kayak rentals, using railings only where absolutely necessary and stepping the walkway down to the water where boats need to tie up. There is no engineering reason Baltimore can’t do the same in the stretches of Harbor East, Fells Point and the Inner Harbor promenade where bars let out, tourists wander and kids run ahead of their parents. Nobody is proposing to wall off the harbor. The ask is a physical edge where a distracted step, a shove or a stumble doesn’t end in a 911 call and a dive team.
It’s worth being honest about what “psychological barriers” actually mean in practice: They work exactly until someone is drunk, or panicked, or a child, or shoved. Which is to say, they don’t work at all in the moments that matter most. A granite curb has never once stopped a person from going into the water. It was never designed to.
Baltimore chose to build this waterfront the way it did, and it can choose to change it. The city has spent four decades treating each death as an isolated tragedy rather than the predictable outcome of a design decision it has repeatedly chosen not to revisit. A real fix — physical barriers in the highest-traffic, highest-risk stretches, phased in rather than delayed indefinitely — costs real money and requires real trade-offs with the views and openness that make the harbor special. But so does another name added to a list that is already 50-plus deep. The next family standing at the water’s edge with a missing-person flyer shouldn’t have to become the next campaign that fizzles out. Build the railing.
Dr. Joseph V. Sakran is a trauma surgeon and executive vice chair of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
