What do we do with the giant pit in the center of downtown Baltimore left by the demolition of the Morris Mechanic Theater? Now that the pit has been there for a while, it must be acknowledged that the theater was not knocked down for any impending new development, but simply because the property owner had been given legal authorization to do it - and wanted to get it done before historic preservationists mustered the power to stop it.
The Mechanic Theater site is too centrally located and too potentially valuable to be used for just anything. It needs to be saved until a commensurately valuable use comes along. The ultimate "highest and best use" would be the city's High Speed Rail Station that should someday join Baltimore with New York and Washington at 300 miles per hour.
While the Mechanic Theater was given a quick death, unlike the protagonist in Baltimore denizen Edgar Allen Poe's classic story about slow death by torture, "The Pit and the Pendulum", it's the city that gets the endless torture: A bottomless pit to nowhere right in the center of town.
The Mechanic Theater was the scene of many dramas over the years. With its pit, the drama continues to haunt us posthumously, like a zombie who refuses to die. The story of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" has also been repeated many times in Baltimore, as slumlords, speculators and even some respected well-meaning landowners sit on their properties and let them die slowly, awaiting some kind of eventual "game changing" bail-out from the city.
It even feeds on itself. The Mechanic Theater's tortuous downfall began when the city rescued the similarly crumbling Hippodrome Theater three blocks west which diverted all the drama. It's just like the pendulum in Poe's story, with a sharp blade that swings and cuts both ways.
The future looks torturously enticing. There's currently a building boom among downtown office buildings to convert them to residential use, led by the one-of-a-kind art deco masterpiece a block east at Ten Light Street. But if the Mechanic site was going to help lead this movement, it would have happened by now. There's currently such a glut of abandoned office space and prime building sites, like the Mercantile Bank building next door, that the Mechanic site must sit and wait its turn. It is not among the low-hanging fruit.
But we can't just wait for the downtown residential market to catch up with the glut of empty office space. And does the city really want its office market to disperse to surrounding areas like Harbor East, Harbor Point, Port Covington and State Center anyway? The pit needs a use now.
Fast forward from Edgar Allen Poe's 19th century gothic horror classic to the immortal lyrics of 1980s one-hit-wonder Timbuk3 quoted above.
To top off all this terminal optimism for the 21st century, the Mechanic Theater is the best apparent site for the future station of the Hyperloop system, Magnetic Levitation system, or whatever other new transportation mode is going to whisk people between New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. at 300 miles per hour or more to make Baltimore an equal partner in the burgeoning east coast economy.
The central station of the city's "heavy rail" Metro subway is right there. The pit left by the Mechanic Theater has been excavated meticulously to avoid cutting into its adjacent tunnel. There's also a web of underground parking woven throughout the Charles Center area. A road descending from Charles Street had to be maintained to reach this parking, which was built in the early 1960s before downtown parking garages had settled into standard design templates.
But the big white elephant in this room is the Baltimore Arena a block to the west, which dwarfs the Mechanic site. Everyone knows the arena must be replaced sooner or later and represents a huge roadblock to redevelopment progress. The area site is also what sits between the Metro subway station and the central light rail line on Howard Street.
The proven way to integrate the transit systems in most rail transit cities is to provide a unified central hub where the various lines come together. This concept has never caught on in Baltimore, and is the primary single reason the city's rail transit doesn't work properly.
The subway and light rail lines come within one block of each other at two locations along Howard Street - Lexington Market and State Center - but the City has been almost antagonistic about bringing them together. At Lexington Market, the linkage is hidden behind buildings. At State Center, the city has steadfastly opposed even the simple idea of painting a crosswalk on Howard Street to the sidewalk that runs between the stations.
When the defunct Red Line light rail project was being designed, the proponents kept repeating the mantra that it would integrate all the rail lines, when it very clearly would not. Their rationalization was in a proposed isolated two block long pedestrian tunnel between the Red Line and the Metro that had not even been included in the Red Line's extensive tunnel design work.
For a true central transit hub, there must be a true activity center where people are drawn together, not just a web of tunnels where people can burrow from one to another.
A Hyperloop or MagLev Station perfectly fills the bill. Baltimore is increasingly being defined as a city along the Northeast U.S. corridor, not the center of a traditional local metropolitan area. Being able to get to Washington in ten minutes or New York in forty minutes would complete this redefinition.
The current 300 mph concept requires the line to be in a deep tunnel. The city must go down deep to meet the trains. There needs to be a new downward extension of downtown to do this - a big pit.
The demolition of the Mechanic Theater has created a relatively small pit. The demolition of the nearby Baltimore Arena would make it into a far larger pit - big enough for a Hyperloop or MagLev Station that connects to everything. There may not even be any other place in Baltimore where this can logically be done.
The big question is: How do we orchestrate progress so that it culminates in the realization of such a vision?
Downtown Partnership even proposed that a major new park be located on the adjacent Baltimore Arena site. This seems rather extravagant but it might make more sense than the Mechanic site.
Parkland is also risky as a temporary use. If it's too successful, it will difficult to pull it away from its users when development is finally ready. That almost happened in the 1980s at the building site at the nearby northwest corner of Calvert and Baltimore Streets. It became a great temporary park and really opened up the adjacent Metro Station escalator portal, before it was finally torn up to build a ho-hum office building. Maybe it should have stayed as a park.
But the bottom line is that permanent parks like the ones that are already in Charles Center should simply be designed as well as possible to maximize their use in concert with surrounding development.
A more appropriate temporary use would be a transit hub for buses serving the adjacent Metro Station. The current pit would not even need to be fully filled in to create such a transit hub. The transit hub could take advantage of this jagged topography to provide a direct connection into the subway station mezzanine and to create a buffer between the buses and the surrounding streets. The existing ramp going down to the parking garage under Charles Center could also be adapted to accommodate the buses. Imaginative designers can always view topography as an opportunity for creative and unique designs.
Then when the Hyperloop Station is finally built, which would justify even better access to transit, the permanent multi-level site layout could be refined to intersperse retail and other active development around the hub, as well as high rise buildings on top. At that time, the very best possible linkages would be provided to the light rail line on Howard Street to the west and the Charles Center Metro Station to the east.
Then the pit would finally be filled and the pendulum would finally be stopped.
 |
| Pit in the middle of downtown where the Mechanic Theater used to be, looking west from Charles Street. The Charles Center Metro Station is behind the retaining wall to the right, under Baltimore Street. The sawtooth roof building in the upper left is the Baltimore Arena, also slated for demolition someday. |
The Mechanic Theater site is too centrally located and too potentially valuable to be used for just anything. It needs to be saved until a commensurately valuable use comes along. The ultimate "highest and best use" would be the city's High Speed Rail Station that should someday join Baltimore with New York and Washington at 300 miles per hour.
While the Mechanic Theater was given a quick death, unlike the protagonist in Baltimore denizen Edgar Allen Poe's classic story about slow death by torture, "The Pit and the Pendulum", it's the city that gets the endless torture: A bottomless pit to nowhere right in the center of town.
The Mechanic Theater was the scene of many dramas over the years. With its pit, the drama continues to haunt us posthumously, like a zombie who refuses to die. The story of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" has also been repeated many times in Baltimore, as slumlords, speculators and even some respected well-meaning landowners sit on their properties and let them die slowly, awaiting some kind of eventual "game changing" bail-out from the city.
It even feeds on itself. The Mechanic Theater's tortuous downfall began when the city rescued the similarly crumbling Hippodrome Theater three blocks west which diverted all the drama. It's just like the pendulum in Poe's story, with a sharp blade that swings and cuts both ways.
 |
| Mechanic Theater pit looking west along the ramp into underground parking garage, above and beyond which is the Baltimore Arena. Just to the right is the Mercantile Bank tower, one of many buildings recently converted to apartments. |
The future looks torturously enticing. There's currently a building boom among downtown office buildings to convert them to residential use, led by the one-of-a-kind art deco masterpiece a block east at Ten Light Street. But if the Mechanic site was going to help lead this movement, it would have happened by now. There's currently such a glut of abandoned office space and prime building sites, like the Mercantile Bank building next door, that the Mechanic site must sit and wait its turn. It is not among the low-hanging fruit.
But we can't just wait for the downtown residential market to catch up with the glut of empty office space. And does the city really want its office market to disperse to surrounding areas like Harbor East, Harbor Point, Port Covington and State Center anyway? The pit needs a use now.
"The future's so bright, we gotta wear shades"
Fast forward from Edgar Allen Poe's 19th century gothic horror classic to the immortal lyrics of 1980s one-hit-wonder Timbuk3 quoted above.
To top off all this terminal optimism for the 21st century, the Mechanic Theater is the best apparent site for the future station of the Hyperloop system, Magnetic Levitation system, or whatever other new transportation mode is going to whisk people between New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. at 300 miles per hour or more to make Baltimore an equal partner in the burgeoning east coast economy.
The central station of the city's "heavy rail" Metro subway is right there. The pit left by the Mechanic Theater has been excavated meticulously to avoid cutting into its adjacent tunnel. There's also a web of underground parking woven throughout the Charles Center area. A road descending from Charles Street had to be maintained to reach this parking, which was built in the early 1960s before downtown parking garages had settled into standard design templates.
But the big white elephant in this room is the Baltimore Arena a block to the west, which dwarfs the Mechanic site. Everyone knows the arena must be replaced sooner or later and represents a huge roadblock to redevelopment progress. The area site is also what sits between the Metro subway station and the central light rail line on Howard Street.
The proven way to integrate the transit systems in most rail transit cities is to provide a unified central hub where the various lines come together. This concept has never caught on in Baltimore, and is the primary single reason the city's rail transit doesn't work properly.
The subway and light rail lines come within one block of each other at two locations along Howard Street - Lexington Market and State Center - but the City has been almost antagonistic about bringing them together. At Lexington Market, the linkage is hidden behind buildings. At State Center, the city has steadfastly opposed even the simple idea of painting a crosswalk on Howard Street to the sidewalk that runs between the stations.
When the defunct Red Line light rail project was being designed, the proponents kept repeating the mantra that it would integrate all the rail lines, when it very clearly would not. Their rationalization was in a proposed isolated two block long pedestrian tunnel between the Red Line and the Metro that had not even been included in the Red Line's extensive tunnel design work.
For a true central transit hub, there must be a true activity center where people are drawn together, not just a web of tunnels where people can burrow from one to another.
A Hyperloop or MagLev Station perfectly fills the bill. Baltimore is increasingly being defined as a city along the Northeast U.S. corridor, not the center of a traditional local metropolitan area. Being able to get to Washington in ten minutes or New York in forty minutes would complete this redefinition.
The current 300 mph concept requires the line to be in a deep tunnel. The city must go down deep to meet the trains. There needs to be a new downward extension of downtown to do this - a big pit.
The demolition of the Mechanic Theater has created a relatively small pit. The demolition of the nearby Baltimore Arena would make it into a far larger pit - big enough for a Hyperloop or MagLev Station that connects to everything. There may not even be any other place in Baltimore where this can logically be done.
The big question is: How do we orchestrate progress so that it culminates in the realization of such a vision?
Mechanic Theater site needs a temporary use
The Mechanic Theater site is too valuable to just sit, but not valuable enough under current market conditions to develop. It needs a temporary use until its value increases. Its value would skyrocket with a Hyperloop station, opening up all sorts of opportunities for new high rise development on top of it.
 |
| Proposed Hyperloop or MagLev Station - bounded by Howard St. (light rail station) to the west, Baltimore/Charles St. (Metro Station) to the north and east, and Lombard St. to the south. The Mechanic Theater at the northeast corner had not been demolished yet in this Google Earth image. |
A temporary new park is always the first thought. But there are already many acres of parkland woven into adjacent Charles Center. It's true that the demolition of the Mechanic Theater has opened up this space and made it potentially more useful, so the existing park layouts should be adjusted to make them work better. Perhaps the Hopkins Plaza park could even be enlarged slightly into the Mechanic site, while still leaving room for future development.
Downtown Partnership even proposed that a major new park be located on the adjacent Baltimore Arena site. This seems rather extravagant but it might make more sense than the Mechanic site.
Parkland is also risky as a temporary use. If it's too successful, it will difficult to pull it away from its users when development is finally ready. That almost happened in the 1980s at the building site at the nearby northwest corner of Calvert and Baltimore Streets. It became a great temporary park and really opened up the adjacent Metro Station escalator portal, before it was finally torn up to build a ho-hum office building. Maybe it should have stayed as a park.
But the bottom line is that permanent parks like the ones that are already in Charles Center should simply be designed as well as possible to maximize their use in concert with surrounding development.
A more appropriate temporary use would be a transit hub for buses serving the adjacent Metro Station. The current pit would not even need to be fully filled in to create such a transit hub. The transit hub could take advantage of this jagged topography to provide a direct connection into the subway station mezzanine and to create a buffer between the buses and the surrounding streets. The existing ramp going down to the parking garage under Charles Center could also be adapted to accommodate the buses. Imaginative designers can always view topography as an opportunity for creative and unique designs.
Then when the Hyperloop Station is finally built, which would justify even better access to transit, the permanent multi-level site layout could be refined to intersperse retail and other active development around the hub, as well as high rise buildings on top. At that time, the very best possible linkages would be provided to the light rail line on Howard Street to the west and the Charles Center Metro Station to the east.
Final resolution
Bottom line: The eventual use of the Mechanic Theater site for the city's high speed MagLev or Hyperloop Station should be considered now. This would create the ultimate impetus for as much high value development as the site can possibly contain.
It would also provide the impetus to finally build a new arena, if that hasn't been resolved by then. The new arena was previously going to be coupled with other far fetched things like landing a new NBA or NHL team or the Olympics, or building a billion dollar convention center replacement, so high speed rail isn't so far outside the realm of possibility, relative to the proverbial snowball in hell.
The mere forty miles between Baltimore and Washington is undoubtedly America's best testing ground to build a high speed rail prototype before spreading it to the rest of the country. High speed rail should start in Baltimore just as conventional rail did 200 years ago.
The mere forty miles between Baltimore and Washington is undoubtedly America's best testing ground to build a high speed rail prototype before spreading it to the rest of the country. High speed rail should start in Baltimore just as conventional rail did 200 years ago.
Then the pit would finally be filled and the pendulum would finally be stopped.
