Taking a look at Baltimore’s “downtown renaissance”
June 27, 2008
It may have something to do with the fact that Charles Center turned 50 this year, or maybe it’s all the condo and office buildings rising along Key Highway and in Harbor East. Whatever the reason, there has been a lot of looking back recently, remembering and critiquing Baltimore’s downtown redevelopment.
Two recently-produced documents demonstrate that there are two very different perspectives on the “downtown renaissance,” and whether it was really as visionary and beneficial for the city as its creators would have us believe.
“Global Harbors: A Waterfront Renaissance,” a documentary film that aired June 10 on Maryland Public Television, and will re-air July 22 at 9 p.m., revisits both Charles Center and Harborplace through the eyes of Martin Millspaugh, former Evening Sun reporter and urban planner, whose work made both developments possible. The basic premise of the film is that Baltimore’s plan to re-develop its waterfront was risky, but it has been a tremendous success, and has inspired waterfront redevelopments in “90 to 100” cities worldwide, including Sydney, Australia — where the Rouse Co. partnered with local government to build a festival market that looks remarkably like Harborplace — to Osaka, Rotterdam, Pittsburgh and Honolulu.
Global Harbors has some really fun footage — sweeping aerial shots that make the Inner Harbor look like paradise rising from the Chesapeake Bay, old TV news shots of Mayor Schaefer taking a dip with the seals at the newly-built aquarium and lots of dramatic scenes of tall ships entering various ports — but at heart, it’s a work of propaganda.
The only voices we hear that dissent to the view that Baltimore’s downtown redevelopment was anything but a miracle are Louise Alder, an “open space activist” who stares contemplatively from a pier and talks bitterly about the “raping and pillaging of every square inch of land” in the harbor, and former mayor Tommy D’Alessandro saying, obscurely, “There are problems of our time that have nothing to do with brick and mortar,” just before the camera pans over scenes of dilapidated buildings in West Baltimore (the corner of Mount and Fayette streets, if I’m not mistaken), highlighting problems that, if they don’t have anything to do with brick and mortar, I’m not sure what they are.
The most telling moment, I think, comes not in the many interviews with such Baltimore luminaries as Al Copp, Bernard Manekin, Jay Brodie and former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, but in an interview with a planner from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who has come to find inspiration for the waterfront redevelopment of that city. “This is my first visit,” she says, “and I’m absolutely amazed by the amount of regeneration, redevelopment.”
The irony of this remark — how can you be amazed by the “regeneration, redevelopment” of an area you’ve never visited before? — no doubt goes unnoticed by most viewers, but it wouldn’t slip past Stephen J.K. Walters, the Loyola College professor who recently presented his paper, Baltimore’s Flawed Renaissance, to City Hall officials, and which we wrote about here).
Walters’ arguments represent the polar opposite of what Global Harbors is trying to get across: Charles Center and the Inner Harbor may attract a lot of money and tourists, but it was built at great cost to the city’s taxpayers, it encouraged the use of eminent domain as a development tool, which in turn drove investors out of the city, and it diverted attention away from the real problems in the city’s peripheral neighborhoods, like drugs, violence, poverty and disinvestment.
In a follow-up email, we asked Professor Walters who, specifically, he had met with at City Hall about his development vision for Baltimore. He demurred, but wrote us:
“I’d prefer not to discuss my various discussions with policy-makers until and unless they actually buy in to the ideas. It’s fairly routine if you do policy analysis to talk to the people who make policy; they explore options and often decide to go in another direction for a lot of reasons. No problem — that’s the ‘marketplace of ideas’ at work.
“What I can say is I’m encouraged that there are apparently lots of people in City Hall who are interested in fresh thinking. There’s a lot of energy and intellect at work there; the city needs that.”
Martin Millspaugh and the producers of Global Harbors would likely say that there has been “fresh thinking” in City Hall for decades, and one need look no further than the Inner Harbor for proof.
What do you think? Are Charles Center and the Inner Harbor renaissance that began in the 1980s a triumph, or a bread-and-circus of monumental proportions?
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
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