On the south bank of Spa Creek and surrounded by condominiums and apartment buildings, Hawkins Cove hosts the highest concentration of households anywhere on Spa Creek. It’s also home to the Truxtun Park boat ramp — the most-used public boat access in the area. And it directly connects to the public housing developments of Harbor House and Eastport Terrace. As such, it’s one of the only areas in the city where underserved communities have direct access to the water.
Despite all that, Hawkins Cove and its pristine wild watershed is the most densely-wooded area on this busy urban creek. It’s home to beavers and deer, herons and owls, foxes and osprey. It wasn’t always like that. In 2018, the Spa Creek Conservancy completed a multimillion-dollar major restoration of the watershed, installing runoff barriers, collection pools and replanting the entire area.
It was a tremendous success: the Hawkins Cove watershed is now a dense riparian forest. While this project ended decades of unimpeded silt and urban pollutant runoff into Spa Creek, work remained: a failing bulkhead, a collapsing public dock, a fallow waterfront plot and the silting in of the cove, choking out SAV and creating a mud flat where boats had once docked, all on city-owned land.
In 2021, the City of Annapolis, with support from the SCC and DF, began the next phase of restoration at Hawkins Cove. Public meetings were held, an RFP issued and, in 2024, the local maritime engineering firm of BayLand Consultants presented a 4-phase plan to replace the failing bulkhead with a living shoreline, to improve stormwater management, to create a waterfront city park with kayaking and fishing access, and to mitigate some of the 10′ of silt that has filled the cove since the 1960s.
The project is underway. For developments, see the city’s page for the project:
The Denker Foundation 