A drastically realigned Baltimore

 While Harbor Place announces one closure after another, Seawall reported that 250 vendors have applied for 55 stalls in the new Lexington Market. Does this stand for a new trend?

Indeed, there is also new energy around the refurbished Cross Street and Broadway Markets with people enjoying pop-up outdoor seating on rededicated parking and street spaces. These days, if one wants to meet people in the City one needs to go to the neighborhood "main streets" from Highlandtown to Canton, and from Middle East to Pennsylvania Avenue.  Downtown Baltimore remains deserted.

Seawall says that the want to be Lexington Market merchants are 60% local, 60% women owned

Downtown on Baltimore Street near Charles: 100% corner
(Photo Philipsen)

and 60% black owned, 35% are Asian. Oviously, some are several of those at once. Most of the businesses in the Inner Harbor , by contrast, are national chains. 

Pennsylvania Avenue and other local commercial strips are populated by nearby residents and essential workers getting around by transit. Downtown streets are empty because office workers now work from home and are stuck in the neighborhoods or suburbs. Tourists and conventioneers don't exist anymore, home-bound they, too are now zoomers. 

As in other cases, the pandemic has not created these conditions entirely from scratch but simply accelerated trends that have been in the making for years. 

Haven't people said for a long time that the Inner Harbor was too dominated by national chains to be even considered genuine Baltimore? Hasn't the auto dominance of Key Highway, Pratt and Light Streets created all kinds of proposals to end the grip of those streets that like a vice choke the life out of Harborplace? The mini malls at the harbor have been on the fritz long before COVID.

The internationally renowned Senior Fellow of the Urban Land Institute, Ed McMahon, a friend of Baltimore, told the Baltimore SUN: 

“T-shirts and mugs and crab memorabilia aren’t going to cut it anymore; you have to offer something unique that appeals to both tourists and locals,” Ed McMahon

The gap between relatively strong life in neighborhood centers and the lifeless downtown (and Inner Harbor) has been growing for a while, COVID only put it on steroids.  Office demand in downtown has been slow for years. Downtown residents which have filled many apartments on converted former office floors have never filled the streets as imagined, they can't replace the lunch-time crowds of office glory days, and in the evening downtown has still only little to offer. 

The slow conversion of downtown from work-center
to neighborhood (Photo Philipsen)

Should the accelerated trends persist beyond the acute pandemic, it would spell a new urban concept for Baltimore, always known as the "city of neighborhoods". 

It would be a  multi-nodal constellation with many neighborhood stars and downtown as a black hole, heavy and big, but without lights. In a less stark and more likely scenario, downtown would become just a regular, but centrally located neighborhood. Parts of Charles and Saratoga Streets could act as small-scale commercial hubs, but would not have a regional pull like Baltimore's downtown of the past. 

Such a constellation poses not only brand identity issues for downtown, but also severe economic questions. The old certainty that all neighborhood folks would naturally want to flock to  downtown as the "commons" of the entire region meets would be rendered a memory of a past. The downtown magnet had lost some attraction ever since the grand department stores closed. It was the Inner Harbor witch its tourists and conventioneers that allowed downtown boosters to hang on to the old idea a while longer.  Downtown as a financial and business hub has also faded for some time, with one business headquarters after another leaving. More and more office space became obsolete. 

The uncomfortable truth is that fewer and fewer people have good reasons to come downtown or even to HarborPlace. The notion of the central city as the sun in a galaxy with downtown as its hottest place, has been deeply ingrained in the minds of planners and politicians the world over. Time to replace it with the multi-nodal urban concept which has been present in the minds of regular people ever since they began flocking to the peripheral malls in lieu of the downtown department stores. 

Today only very few US downtowns live up to the image of Times Square in New York or Market Street in San Francisco. Baltimore hasn't had this vitality in a long time and all the heroic efforts have not changed a steady pace of declining importance, neither Charles Center, nor Center Plaza, the Arena, the Convention Center or the downtown sports stadia. The many new boutique hotels have added choices for tourists and conventioneers but their future is in question. The so-called Westside Renaissance ("The west has zest") has never been very zesty, even though large investments were actually made and the area was declared an arts district to boot. What works there is new housing and maybe, the brand-new Lexington Market. 

Nothing to do at the Inner Harbor?

"Urban planning is managing coexistence in shared space, the question is less what a city becomes but who in the city belongs" Julian Agyeman. Professor of Urban Planning, Tuft University

What are the lessons? To whom belongs downtown? What can downtown, the Inner Harbor and the Westside learn from Highlandtown, Remington, Canton, Federal Hill, Pigtown and Pennsylvania Avenue?

• The central notion of Harborplace as Baltimore's "living room" was to reinvent the waterfront from  a rat infested stinking liability into an asset that neighborhoods could share. It was not to provide a playground for tourists. The initial stores were local and the concept was a marketplace not entirely unlike today's food halls. That original notion is still good, even though revitalized waterfronts have become a dime a dozen. But instead of trending towards homogeneity, Baltimore's uniqueness needs to be brought to the fore. Instead of Cheesecake Factory, Dicks, Ripley's and the awful pirate drinking ship, emphasize Domino Sugar, the view of the Key Bridge, the historic buildings such as the Sugar House and Recreation Pier, fishing and tugboats and the sale of fish fresh from a boat. 
• The new design for Rash Field, the still attractive five-mile waterfront promenade and improved water taxi landings are amenities foremost for residents of the adjacent communities. This all will be great amenities for some time to come, no doubt. 
• Let go of the pavilions and concentrate urban retail, restaurants and services around the outer edge of the harbor, across from Pratt and Light Streets. This would visually and functionally expand the sense of place of "HarborPlace" and open vistas of the water.
• The neighborhood lesson of local retail and restaurants needs to be paired with the other lesson that COVID teaches us: Streets are for more than cars. The take-out food, sidewalk browsing, and the outdoor eating culture need to be brought into downtown streets as well.  

Los Angeles" Transportation manager Seleta Reynolds told National Public Radio's Marketplace host Kai Rhyssdal that in a crisis people have to reposition their assets. She meant LA's Streets, which like Baltimore's, have frequently been re-purposed for outdoor dining, walking, biking and quiet and safe outdoor space in front of residences. 

"Streets are actually public space. They’re just like parks or anything else. We who live in a city, we own them. And when we have a huge moment, like the one we’re living through now, where, you know, small businesses … we could see that they were all struggling. So we decided it was time to think differently about how we use that public space, and instead of using it to store cars, could we use it for restaurants to set up tables, for stores to sell to customers?" (Seleta Reynolds, Transportation Manager LA)

Thus, the freeway style five and six-lane speedways around the harbor would become single loaded urban boulevards with largely unimpeded views of the water. Downtown streets could expand their skinny sidewalks through "parklets" and sidewalk dining. 

To whom belongs the street? Outdoor dining in Fells Point 
(Photo Philipsen)

But the blueprint for a reimagined new spatial concept for Baltimore still needs an economic base. Residences, food markets and sidewalk dining alone are not enough to keep the city afloat. 

What will replace the conventioneers, the tourists and the ballgame crowds? Or even more urgent, what will replace the once dominant feature of downtown, the office? Even if 90% workers would slowly come back, a 10% permanent loss requires creative new ideas for replacement uses. Not to mention the restaurants and hotels which can't survive this coming winter.

Making parts of the old Market Center district an arts district was one of the promising ideas, especially if the downtown arts district would be the one, where all cultures can co-mingle and belong. Downtown can be the place for those ethnic festivals that haven't found a home in the neighborhoods. City Fair once functioned as such. The night market in the former Chinatown area was a big success. Many more sustainable solutions need still to be invented: New retail concepts that, like Apple stores, mix up the concept of sale and museum. Pop up work spaces that allow the type of mingling that some modern creative work requires could replace some corporate headquarters. Co-working spaces are here to stay.

To whom belongs the city?  Becoming vs belonging
(Photo Philipsen)

Maybe some types of clean manufacturing can return to downtown which once was also a center of the garment industry. Modern types of production can be clean, interactive and need no longer be hidden in ugly industrial zones without good access. 

Theaters, movie houses, museums, concert halls and show spaces are already in or near downtown, hopefully they can slowly be nursed back to life as truly regional magnets, possibly combined with temporary or permanent outdoor spaces where art can unfold safely, even in a pandemic. 

There are still more questions than answers. We can be pretty certain, though, that "the good old days" won't return. Given how segregated the city has been to date, a realignment was a necessity anyway.  

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA