I had a great week on my bike. I rode to the Y and back, even when I could have used the car–a small thing, but a big shift, and it takes basically the same amount of time. I biked to Mount Vernon for a coffee date, to Hampden for a lunch date, and down to Harbor East for dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. It helped that the weather was unseasonably warm, but really, it’s a mind shift: the bike is how I travel, so that’s how I traveled this week. It was glorious.

My ride to Hampden took me along Wyman Park Drive, which was a construction clusterfuck because Johns Hopkins is building their new AI center on that corner, and they are cutting down a bunch of trees to make room for it. People who care about those trees are not happy about it, not at all. Hopkins says they’ll plant an additional 300 trees, but people who care about these trees want these trees.

If you don’t know the trees, it might be hard to care about the trees. There are other trees, right? And this part of the city has the tree canopy of a long-resourced neighborhood, so what’s 55 trees gone, if they are replaced? But trees are more than just the number of them there are. Like, when I was a little kid, my mom planted a couple of trees on the median in front of our house. We called them our “tiny trees,” and when I visited them last year, they weren’t so tiny anymore, and one of them was gone. That’s fine with me, and I assume the tree is gone because it had to go, but I can imagine it being a real loss to someone.

Hopkins cutting down these trees is just part of the issue, though. Building this behemoth means traffic concerns, worries about construction vibration on area buildings, bird safety with all the glass going up there, and, if we’re being real, the mistrust that comes from generations of Hopkins hegemony. The institution has betrayed a lot of trust for a long time, and it seems to get whatever it wants most of the time: cell lines, police forces, neighborhoods, and more. The trees matter, and they are just the latest to matter to those who want Hopkins to pay its fair share, and to listen to the communities it occupies.

I snapped this picture on my way home, walking up the sidewalk on this part of Wyman Park Drive while I still can. The trucks were there to haul off the debris from the trees getting removed yesterday afternoon, in spite of the protest. It’s hard to live here and not think that yet again, the fix is in. This is what happens when an institution has so much economic power–and a reminder that as workers, we have to build ours, too. The class war has always been on, and the workers aren’t winning it.

But I digress. I’m glad I could walk my bike up the sidewalk yesterday, but I won’t be able to do that for long. This stretch will be shut down for years, so I’ll have to take the long way to Hampden, Druid Hill Park, and points west. I knew about the fight to save the trees, but until I biked by, I didn’t know exactly which trees or where, another reminder to stay on the bike, and to bike up Remington. It’ll be open during construction, and I want to see what they end up putting there.