Baltimore's old downtown - what's next?

In the fifties and sixties when downtown threatened to become a stagnant backwater forward-looking local stakeholders and leaders created Charles Center with the then all new urban concept of separating car traffic from pedestrians and class A buildings of a size, scale, convenience and modernity unknown in Baltimore. Mies' office did a building and later Ian Pei and Charles Center became a rejuvenation recipe for many cities across the country.

Lexington Street at Charles Street before urban renewal

In the late eighties when downtown once again stagnated and the wisdom of large scale urban renewal, skybridges and lots of downtown parking garages began to crumble, the Baltimore waterfront became the hot new location pushing further and further east with the Constellation building and finally Harbor East, HarborPoint, and Canton Crossing. The envisioned Port Covington will outdo all of the above. In short, the process of allocating traditional downtown uses along the waters edge is far from complete.

Each time the question arises: What to do with the old downtown?

For a while old office buildings were absorbed by businesses and non-profits looking for a lower price-point than the latest class A office building with all amenities. Various non-profits established low cost headquarters in old buildings. When that process started to stutter the new idea became to use old "obsolete" office building for another purpose altogether: Adaptive re-use, an approach that had already become popular for obsolete and vacant industrial buildings and warehouses.

Old downtown Baltimore received a significant boost from the conversion of old office buildings into apartments. To reduce the difficulties the codes presented in such conversions, a new rehabilitation code was created and opened the door for downtown as Baltimore's newest "neighborhood". These type conversions probably culminated in the One Light Street former Nations Bank building, the largest vacant office building which last year added over 400 apartments to downtown in one fell swoop.

Lexington Street at Charles and Liberty after urban renewal. The tall
building on the right is the BGE headquarters

A subset of the idea of turning old offices into new apartments is the installation of boutique  and suite hotels in class B building stock. Just when one would think that there can't possibly be a market for yet another hotel, the Baltimore Business Journal broke the news last week that the forever vacant 12 story 1884 Jefferson building on Charles and Fayette will be converted to a 102 room Candlewood Suites hotel.

It probably made many in the hospitality industry groan when they tallied all the new "keys and deds" that have come online in recent years. Saturation with apartments and "keys" is on the mind of many downtown boosters. Where should all the people come from, they ask.

Indeed, the conversion flood still leaves not only the problem of a potentially over-saturated market but there are still many remaining old downtown buildings, magnificent but still unoccupied, either because of complicated ownerships, physical problems such as lack of access or lighting or because of limitations on demand.  The issue of "what's next is back with a vengeance now that most of the low hanging fruit has been picked and the demand for downtown living has also been skimmed by developers building a record number of brand-new apartment buildings banking on the same notion of downtown as a neighborhood.

Meanwhile offices tend to get smaller thanks to changes in how workstations are organized, driving down the demand for office space that hasn't been very strong to begin with. Baltimore has never been a hotbed of  Fortune 500 companies, nor is it attracting new ones. None of this helps with filling vacant class B or C office buildings in the historic downtown.

Posters that Detroit's Dan Gilbert in trouble this year

What's next?

It isn't that a class B office building could never be upgraded to a class A building, especially not if the entire old downtown remains an area that is attractive as a location. More than the building itself it is often the location that poses the hurdle.

Therein lies the rub: The issue isn't so much the physical condition of a building but the one branding and conception conception of an entire area and, of course the economy. Baltimore's Downtown Partnership has understood this for a long time:

If we've learned anything from Downtown's ebb and flow over the past several decades, it's that market forces, alone, will not determine Downtown’s fate. Deliberate intervention by the public and private sector is needed to address challenges and create new opportunities.(DPoB 2011 Downtown Strategic Plan)

The case of the headquarters of Baltimore Gas and Electric is illustrative. Originally a well regarded municipal energy monopoly, the headquarters were located near Charles Street facing Liberty Street and the plaza that was created as part of the Charles Center Urban renewal. The building was splendid enough to be one of the few to survive the urban renewal of Charles Center and remained standing so that BGE could eat its cake and have it, too: It had a prestiguous historic building and it was located right across from Baltimore's brandnew Charles Center landmark building, the Mies van der Rohe tower of One Charles Center.

The Detroit Athletic Club, an Albert Kahn building, 1915,
Photo: Jason Robinson Photography

But then two things happened: First, Charles Center's urban design paradigms fell out of favor as noted above and Baltimore's prestigious office locations migrated south and east along the newly refurbished Inner Harbor. Second, BGE was bought out by the energy conglomerate Constellation, the old downtown wasn't good enough anymore and the new company built a new facility on Pratt Street. The old BGE building was finally converted into apartments by developer David Hillman who had the courage to believe the city would soon rehabilitate the "Superblock" on the Westside. Of course, he is still waiting for that today.

When Constellation merged with Exelon, Baltimore not only lost its only Fortune 500 company, the game of musical chairs started all over. By now, HarborPoint was the most prestigious place and the energy giant promised the city to build a sort of secondary headquarters there, as a consolation price for absorbing Constellation. Now the even the class A building on Pratt Street stood largely vacant, mopping up whatever remaining demand there was in Baltimore's office market.

Baltimore is not a City that attracts large corporate headquarters, in fact, it didn't do that during most of its history with few exceptions. Thus, the draw of Goodyear (Cleveland), PNC, Kraft or PPG (Pittsburgh) or Macy's or Kroger (Cincinnatti) that helps those cities to keep their downtown attractive doesn't exist in Baltimore.

Union Trust Building, also the known as the
Jefferson, 1902 postcard

A focus on Fortune 500 headquarters may be misguided to begin with and not worth the envy if one looks at the feeble health of some of the companies headquartered in competing cities.  But the absence of those companies here eliminates also the likelihood of a multi-billionaire who makes saving downtown his particular focus, as Detroit's Dan Gilbert (Quicken) did.

“Mayor Mike Duggan and city planner Maurice Cox generally feel that Midtown and Downtown are going to take care of themselves because of the money that’s poured into the area. Everything is propped up, especially in Midtown, by foundations” (Stephen Vogel, FAIAProfessor of Architecture, Detroit, source)

This would be quite an overstatement if applied to Baltimore in spite of the widespread believe that downtown gets all the resources already.

Detroit's downtown renaissance also opens the question of another important topic: equity. This is expressed by Detroit's current planning director Cox who understands this aspect quite well as he illustrated in a talk about urban turnaraound here in Baltimore.

"What's going to distinguish Detroit's recovery from any other comeback city is its ability to be an equitable recovery," Maurice Cox, Detroit's planning director

Baltimore as a city, and its historic downtown in particular could certainly use equity as an approach. Too long downtown has been considered as the counterpart to the neighborhoods. Instead, downtown needs to create a new narrative that is not in conflict with the neighborhoods and equity and is uniquely Baltimore. Seeing downtown as a neighborhood with many residents was a step in the right direction. The Downtown Partnership must be credited with pushing hard for this to happen, even including some affordable units. With residents in place, demand for the typically small scale ground floor retail spaces should go up, for cafes, food stores and specialty shops. But it won't be enough.

The area still lacks life after office hours, and too many buildings seen as undesirable for a conversion, either because of their bricks and mortar features, or their location. For those buildings to revive, Baltimore needs a strategy of attracting start-ups, small businesses, professional service providers and the like, folks that can't afford to rent class A space but who crave authentic historic buildings for lower rent in downtown. Those businesses exist and thrive. They frequently reside in shoddy suburban "professional centers" which have not much else to offer than convenient parking and increasingly come under pressure for their lack of any sense of place.

Issues: Light and egress in old downtown

Any strategy towards filling Baltimore's old downtown buildings points to transportation and access as one of the key issues and hurdles. Not getting the Red Line and no other larger MTA investment in sight, the prospect of solving the access problem now must rest on creating good policies that manage autonomous vehicles. As transit and as shared fleet-vehicles, the AV may be just the right medicine for Baltimore and its downtown and its access problems.

Unfortunately, there is no sign that DPoB or B-DOT have a strategy in the works that gives this imminent technology the important role it could play.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

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Kansas City's downtown revives old office towers (Kansas City Star)