"50 years of a connection to the other side of the state, and now it's gone," Pete Triantafilos said.
A photo of the iconic Key Bridge hangs inside Costas Inn, a Dundalk institution in its own right. But for owner Triantafilos, the loss is about more than just sentimentality. It's about sustaining his business.
When the bridge came crashing down into the Patapsco River one year ago, so too did his restaurant's connection to customers on the other side.
"A 22 minute ride would now be over an hour," Triantafilos told Scripps News Group's Elizabeth Worthington. "It definitely is getting worse, because once people get used to going to other places, and they're like, you know, we love coming here, but the commute is just a factor. So as time goes on, it does get worse, and a 4-5 year window to get a new bridge is a long time."
While drivers can opt to skip the trip to their favorite restaurant, the trip to work isn't so easy to do away with. And with a crucial piece to the 51-mile loop known as Baltimore's Beltway now missing, congestion has become part of the daily commute for many.
"It's like a parking lot," Dwan De Anda told Scripps News Group as he waited to catch a bus in Dundalk. "The buses leaving the Dundalk terminal, even the drivers are saying they're noticing their times are later and later and taking longer and longer to get the distances."
"I catch the bus but I have friends that are blue collar workers and everything and they complain because they took the bridge every day. So it's affected them badly," Alex Shifflett said.
But for some, the commute is almost considered a blessing. It means they have a job again. Last year, the collapse shut down the Port of Baltimore, and shut thousands of longshoremen out of a job for months. So workers like Dammin Johnson are fine with the extra time it takes to get from Dundalk to his home in Brooklyn.
"It's all good. I mean, just waiting. As long as the ships keep rolling," Johnson told Scripps News Group.
But there's another type of traffic rolling through town on the West side of the bridge – this one, unwelcome. There's been a huge increase in trucks trying to share the local roads in Curtis Bay and Brooklyn.
"It clogs up our main street," Meredith Chaiken, the executive director of the Greater Baybrook Alliance, said. "I's really been depressing a lot of the local retail activity here."
Chaiken's organization represents both the Curtis Bay and Brooklyn neighborhoods. She's helping restaurant owners come up with ways to boost business, such as expanding their online ordering or delivery capabilities, and working on solutions to make the streets more pedestrian-friendly.
"We're hoping to see some of the truck traffic re-routed to a parallel road, just so we can have Hanover Street just be more local traffic," Chaiken said. "But I do think a good portion of it that we have to just kind of muddle through the next few years until the bridge is open again."
On both sides of the bridge, the mindset is the same: this obstacle is nothing we can't overcome.
"We've had a few crises that as a community, we've gotten through, and so I think we'll get through this one," Chaiken said.
"We're just gonna go through like every other hurdle; we've been through a lot down here on the Eastside," Triantafilos said. "There's been a lot of obstacles over the last 54 years; we've fared through all of them, and we'll fare through this one as well."
This story was originally published by Elizabeth Worthington with the Scripps News Group.
