Arnold's Summer, Rewired By A Trail That Took 27 Years To Finish

On the last Monday in March, a small crowd gathered at the intersection of the Broadneck Trail and the Bay Head Park spur to cut a ribbon that had been a long time coming. Anne Arundel County residents can now enjoy all eight miles of the Broadneck Peninsula Trail after a ribbon-cutting ceremony marked the completion of three new sections, on a $17.5 million project first proposed in 1999, with construction beginning in 2012.

If you live in Arnold, the news is not that a trail opened. It is that Arnold quietly stopped being a place you can only move through by car.

What actually changed on March 30

For most of the last decade, the Broadneck Peninsula Trail was a stub. You could pick it up near Bay Dale Drive, ride a couple of miles east, and then the pavement ran out. The version we live with now is different in kind, not degree. It connects the existing B&A Trail to Sandy Point State Park and has multiple entry points, also known as spurs, along the College Parkway corridor, including at Bay Head Park, Broadneck Library and Anne Arundel Community College.

The practical translation: an Arnold resident can now leave a driveway near the AACC campus, ride east on a paved 10-foot-wide asphalt path, and end at a Chesapeake Bay beach without touching a car door. Or head the other direction, hit the B&A Trail at Summers Road, and keep going. The paved 13-mile B&A Trail connects the Chesapeake Bay cities of Baltimore and Annapolis, features the Planet Walk, a multi-mile display that might challenge your perception of the solar system, and each year hosts a Marathon and Half-Marathon along the trail route.

The finished trail turns an eight-mile stretch of the peninsula into a single connected weekend. That is the news.

The county officials who spoke at the ceremony framed the completion as infrastructure. For residents, the more useful frame is real estate: the trail changes what "walkable" means in Arnold. A house on a cul-de-sac near Peninsula Farm Road is now a short pedal from the library, the community college, and a state park beach. That was not true in February.

The five doors onto the trail

The spurs matter more than the trail's mainline, because they are how a normal summer Saturday actually starts. Each door opens onto a different kind of afternoon.

• Broadneck Park (613 College Parkway) is the workhorse entry. Parking is available at Broadneck Park, and other amenities include athletic fields, picnic tables, restrooms, and a dog park. If you have kids, this is where the day begins.
• The Bay Head Park spur is where the March ribbon was cut, and it is the natural pause point for anyone riding the full length. Benches, shade, and now signage.
• The Broadneck Library spur turns a book return into a two-hour outing. Ride in, drop off, read on the grass, ride home.
• The Anne Arundel Community College connection matters year-round, not just for students. Continuing-ed classes, the aquatics center, and the AACC theater season are all now trail-adjacent for anyone within a mile of College Parkway.
• The eastern terminus at Sandy Point is the payoff. On a July Saturday, a bike beats the Route 50 traffic to the beach parking lot, and there is no gate fee for a resident on two wheels.

The Friends of Anne Arundel County Trails, the volunteer nonprofit that has shepherded the project for years, treats the network as one system: the organization encompasses the B&A Trail, the BWI Trail, the Broadneck Peninsula Trail, the South Shore Trail, and the WB&A Trail as well as new trails being designed or constructed. The map on their site is worth bookmarking if you have not already; it is the clearest picture of what is now stitched together.

Where the trail meets a plate

The interesting second-order effect is what happens to Arnold's restaurants. A restaurant on the water used to be a driving decision. Now several of them are a coasting decision.

Consider the Magothy side. Bobby Jones and Michael S. Neall, two Arnold residents, opened The Point Crab House & Grill at Ferry Point Marina, located on Mill Creek on the Magothy River, only 1 river north of Annapolis. It is not directly on the mainline trail, but a short connector from the Cape St. Claire area puts it within a reasonable ride for anyone who wants steamed crabs at the end of the loop instead of a mid-ride Gatorade. Fresh produce and seafood are central to the menu with emphasis on the Chesapeake region, and the owners will purchase as much produce and seafood harvested within a 50 mile radius as possible throughout the season.

Closer to the trail proper, the everyday roster is deeper than most residents give it credit for. Donnelly's Dockside, Full On Craft Eats & Drinks, Cantler's Riverside, and O'Loughlin's Restaurant & Pub all read as short-detour lunches once you accept that the trail, not Ritchie Highway, is now the main east-west route on a Saturday. Cantler's in particular is the sort of place where the crab cakes rate highly and lunch guests describe the ambiance as "incredibly cool"; that is the kind of endorsement that ages well.

For an evening that is not on the water, Spizzico Italian Kitchen sits on the Broadneck Peninsula with a specific origin story worth knowing. Spizzico is located in Arnold, Maryland, and is owned and operated by three friends from Monte Di Procida, a small town outside Naples, Italy, who joined forces in 2013 to bring NY-style pizza and their Italian roots to the Broadneck Peninsula. That is not a chain story, and it is the sort of neighborhood detail that turns takeout into a habit.

The Ritchie Highway counterweight

The trail rewires the east-west map, but Ritchie Highway is still the north-south spine, and it holds a set of everyday anchors the trail cannot replace. This is the part of Arnold that feels least like a suburb and most like a town.

Broadneck Pharmacy is the clearest example. Broadneck Pharmacy opened in 1985 at its current location by Bud LaChapelle, and started by serving the patients of doctor's offices in the Broadneck Medical Center; over the years the pharmacy's reach has spread throughout the Broadneck Peninsula and into Severna Park and Annapolis. Bud's son Marcus LaChapelle graduated from the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy in 2007 and bought the pharmacy in 2009. Forty years, two generations, one address. There are neighborhoods within a half-hour drive that no longer have anything like this.

The Ritchie corridor also holds the rainy-day roster: Mother's Peninsula Grille for a burger and a beer, the Bay Dale shopping center for the weekly errand, and the various coffee stops that residents rotate through without ever needing to name them. This is the piece of Arnold that does not photograph well and does not need to. It is the reason people who move here stay.

What it means to live here now

Real estate in Arnold has always been sold on two lines: proximity to Annapolis and access to water. The finished trail adds a third that was not there a year ago. A buyer touring a home on the Broadneck Peninsula this summer is buying access to a car-free eight-mile corridor that ends at a state park beach on one side and a 13-mile rail-trail on the other. That is a genuinely new argument, and it will show up in listing descriptions long before it shows up in comparable sales data.

For those of us already here, the reframe is simpler. The trail turns a summer that used to be organized around driveways and drives into one organized around a loop you can do on a bike. Weekend routines will shift accordingly, and the restaurants and shops that sit near the spurs will feel the difference first.

If you are thinking about what your next chapter in Arnold looks like, whether that is a move within the peninsula, a first home near the trail, or a sale of the house the kids grew up in, we would be glad to walk the neighborhood with you. Reach out to the team at Christine Joyce and Jean Andrews to schedule a personal neighborhood tour.