Shovels "ready" - but Amazon says Baltimore isn't

Not ready. That's how Susan Yum of the Baltimore Development Corporation, the quasi-public arm of city government, described why Amazon rejected Baltimore for its new headquarters (according to the January 27th Baltimore Sun): "Amazon didn't think Baltimore was ready to host its new office complex..."

This shovel is ready for Amazon, poised on the large front lawn of the Baltimore Sun Printing Plant in Port Covington.
Interstate 95 is in the background to the right..

In a twist of irony, "ready" is also exactly the word that Mayor Pugh used to tout Baltimore's unique advantage over the other 237 proposals from other cities. But the mayor was referring to shovels, as in "shovel ready", not to cities.

Yes, those inanimate shovels are ready. They're poised at Port Covington, behind the new Under Armour sportswear campus and next to the Baltimore Sun's printing plant, bastion of the pre-internet  world that Amazon has been efficiently demolishing ever since it was founded by Jeff Bezos.

Baltimore has been acting as if Amazon would be incapable of getting any shovels ready on its own. As if Amazon was thus going to evaluate all the cities' proposals on the basis of their shovels, not their cities.

It's deja-vu to the 2008-9 "Great Recession", when being "shovel ready" was the top criterion for spending the federal trillion dollar stimulus package, rather than best preparing for the future. As a result, that was the last time that Baltimore had a strong road paving program ("Operation Orange Cone"), but now the roads are crumbling again as the big infrastructure expenditures have now turned to the city's obsolete sewer system and deteriorating schools.

In the interim, the city's big infrastructure project was supposed to be the three billion dollar light rail Red Line. When that imploded or was exploded (take your pick), instead of finding a way to actually make it work, it has just become a weapon for various "I told you so's."

City apologists practically prodded Amazon to say that the lack of the Red Line (which wouldn't have gone anywhere near their site) was the smoking gun that killed Baltimore's proposal.

Of course, Amazon didn't bite. Amazon wasn't even critical of the city's murder rate or school system, much less its transit system. Nashville, Raleigh, Austin, Columbus and Indianapolis all made Amazon's candidate list with clearly meager mass transit systems, while the State of Maryland did promise to build a light rail line to the proposed Port Covington Amazon site.

Baltimore's basic problem is that is always fixated on one project, issue or development site at a time. The shovels should be construed as the last step, not the first.

Baltimore has plenty of great sites for a major new corporate headquarters. Port Covington is only one. Here are ten of them that I quickly identified right after Amazon announced they were looking.

Six Chicago sites for Amazon's new headquarters within several miles of the city center. (City of Chicago)

Other cities did not limit their proposals to one site. For example, Chicago also identified ten sites. Here's a map of six of Chicago's sites within just over two mile of the city center: https://chicago.curbed.com/2017/10/23/16512138/chicago-amazon-hq2-bid

Any proposal can also include phantasmagorical architectural images. Below is an image of one of Chicago's sites rendered by a consultant working for architectural giant Skidmore Owings and Merrill. This site has been dubbed "The 78" because it is not part of any of the city's 77 official neighborhoods. Not being part of the city's neighborhood fabric is thus being sold as an advantage.

These kinds of images may impress the Baltimore City Council and the Sun Editorial Board, but Amazon has probably seen so many of them in the past few months that their eyes have glazed over. Getting out the shovels to build it is the least of their issues.

Image of a proposed Chicago site for Amazon, but it could just as easily be Baltimore (ICON)

So "Amazon didn't think Baltimore was ready..." That's such a succinct, all encompassing way to describe the city's rejection.

What it says is: Yes, Baltimore is definitely moving on down the road. What it doesn't say is where the city as a whole is actually going.

So at the same time, Amazon will be moving down a different road.

No Inner Harbor "End Game" for dormant Harborplace

In the 1980s, Harborplace defined the Inner Harbor, so much so that its developer, James Rouse, was often given credit for the entire celebrated waterfront revitalization. But now and for the past year and a half, most of its small shops and eateries have been closed, awaiting a renovation that was supposed to take six months but still has no completion date.

Harborplace with the Questar Tower under construction in the background,
and behind that another residential tower, Harbor Court.

The odd thing is that Harborplace no longer seems to matter all that much, despite what it once meant to the city's image. 

Most of the larger tenants remained open, but they are now practically all national chains like Hooters, H&M, Bubba Gump, Ripley's Believe it or Not, Uno's Chicago Pizzeria and Cheesecake Factory that could be found almost anywhere. Over the years, there had been a previous wave of closures of the original anchors who were unique to Baltimore. The largest and most successful, Phillips Seafood, moved only several blocks to the Power Plant, but most disappeared completely.

Now even the national chains are taking a hit. One of Harborplace's largest retailers, Urban Outfitters, closed this past January 7th. They still have stores in Towson, Tulsa, Spokane, Boise and dozens of other towns and cities, but not here in Baltimore.

The previous September, Harborplace's owner, Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp, announced that one of the two pavilions would be completed in time for the holidays, but that didn't happen and little visible progress has been made.

Harborplace's crapped-up interior mall has been sitting like this for over a year., but now without Urban Outfitters.
 Who knows what's been happening behind those construction walls? 

Inner Harbor 2.0: Tourist mecca

All of this has not kept the city from preparing ambitious "revisioning" plans for the Inner Harbor and its interface with the rest of the city. Amid all this, much change has actually occurred, but mostly not following any script of those visions. And not involving Harborplace, which is ironic considering what it once meant to the Inner Harbor, and still does in legends, lore and iconography.

The big plans have mostly revolved around tourism and visitors. The flagship was a billion dollar replacement and expansion for most of the convention center which would include a huge new arena, hotel and still more retail. Then there was the Baltimore Grand Prix, a "world class" sports event that lasted two years, until a scheduling snafu derailed it long enough so it could be conveniently forgotten. But can we forget what our leaders promised us?

Pratt Street was supposed to be rebuilt as a two-way boulevard with narrower berms and sidewalks to make room for still more retail. A tiny bit of that retail has actually happened - a Shake Shack, Chick-Fil-A and a CVS Drug Store that moved down from a block north. A bikeway was also built that's basically just a glorified sidewalk. Aren't bikes supposed to stay off sidewalks?

One very well received Inner Harbor revision was to widen Pratt Street into a two-way boulevard
 with narrower sidewalks (similar to Conway Street) with a giant video screen replacing McKeldin Fountain
near Light Street to block people's attention away from the old boring Inner Harbor. (Prepared by Ayers Saint Gross)

The major recent project near Harborplace was to demolish the massive McKeldin Fountain which was built soon afterward in the 1980s, essentially reverting the median between Light and Calvert Street to its condition as the grassy two-dimensional "Sam Smith Park" which existed in the 1960s and 1970s. A "Phase Two" has also been talked about, which was geared to a traffic plan that was supposed to be studied a decade ago, the outcome of which was never released.

There have also been many iterations of plans to "reinvent" Rash Field near Federal Hill, most ambitiously as a gateway to a proposed huge pedestrian drawbridge over the Inner Harbor to Pier Six. Rash Field itself would be transformed into an answer to Chicago's touristy Millennium Park. Another idea was to rebuild the park as the roof of a parking garage underneath. Amusement park rides were another idea, and two carousels have appeared over the years, then deteriorated and disappeared. With the onset of time and financial realities, the various plans have continually gotten less sweeping and ambitious, and became more just dabs of this 'n' that.

Inner Harbor is now a neighborhood

Fortunately, all these recent tourism and retail travails have not negatively affected the residential sector, which has been booming near the Inner Harbor. This has been led by the city's tallest residential tower now under construction by Questar Development across Light Street on the McCormick Spice Company site, which has been a parking lot since soon after Harborplace opened in the 1980s. Just a few blocks north on Light Street are the recent conversion of the 34 story Art Deco masterpiece at Ten Light Street from office to luxury residential and a new tower across the street on the Southern Hotel site which stood vacant for decades.

The reasons people are being attracted to live in these high rent buildings is a lively topic for speculation, but an abundance of nearby retail stores is certainly not among them. And office development is not it either, because much of the new residential replaced office buildings.

Tourism and conventions? Highly doubtful. To listen to city leaders over the years, Baltimore's tourism industry has always been only one or two major projects away from fulfilling its vaunted promise, whether it be the billion dollar mega-convention-hotel-arena, the Grand Prix or a pedestrian drawbridge from Rash Field to Pier Six.

Proposed pedestrian drawbridge across the Inner Harbor from redesigned Rash Field (right) to a new center of downtown
 near Harbor East and Harbor Point, that would divert attention way from Harborplace and the old downtown.   

And the rest have been projects that mostly attempt to undo what has already been done. That includes the attempt to turn Pratt Street into a two-way boulevard with narrower building setbacks like the rest of the city, the demolition of the McKeldin Fountain or the various alternative reworkings Rash Field as another Millennium Park.

In fact, much of the recent residential success has happened as a Plan B, after previous Plan A failures for offices, retail or tourism. Then Harbor East became the hot address for both new office and residential, along with Federal Hill and Locust Point. The Questar apartment tower had previously been touted as a site for the Exelon office headquarters before they decided on Harbor Point instead.

Maybe the recent residential boom is merely a product of external economic and demographic factors for which the city has little control.

Maybe the mystique of the Inner Harbor is only a secondary factor. Maybe it's not the brilliance and vision of Baltimore's leaders (usually pointing at Mayor William Donald Schaefer with a bit of help from those who came before and after) who inspired City Planners to create a timeless urban masterpiece.

Just maybe... the Inner Harbor's success was merely a fortuitous outcome of unique urban geography... an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay that fully penetrates into the gut of the city. And so people want to live there.

What goes around comes around

Recently, the city has devoted most of its available resources to other nearby playgrounds for the rich  like Harbor East, Harbor Point and Port Covington that were heretofore seen as offshoots of the Inner Harbor's success. But now the tables have turned the other way. Now the Inner Harbor is the offshoot of those other places.

So the Inner Harbor has already had its turn in the spotlight. It shouldn't demand hundreds of millions more dollars to subsidize the rich. Maybe the rich will embrace the Questar Tower anyway, or maybe it will not command the rents the developers expect, at least not indefinitely. The rich are a choosy lot. The great thing about the law of trickle-down economics is that if it starts trickling from a high enough stratum, it has plenty of room to trickle to the mere well-to-do and then to the middle class.

Trickle-down is only a problem when housing can no longer serve the lower class, and there is no one left to trickle down to. That's when housing is abandoned, as has happened all too much in Baltimore.

But Baltimore now has a unique opportunity near the Inner Harbor to make affordable housing work on a large scale - the Perkins Homes public housing complex redevelopment just north of Fells Point and Harbor Point, which hence could be called Perkins Point. In most instances, density works against the economics of mixed income projects which significantly limits them. But Perkins Point is a rare opportunity where high density can really work because the land has such high value.

This sign is currently (2018) on various mall walls inside Harborplace where retail shops once were. 

As for the constantly changing retail environment, it's a conundrum that's not worth attempts at deciphering by ordinary mortals. Yes, the internet has hurt brick 'n' mortar retail. But since the suburbs had previously clobbered Baltimore's retail sector before the internet ever came along, the internet has actually leveled the playing field.

So the Questar Tower won't have an Urban Outfitters right across the street. Who cares? Just order online, like anyone else.

If anyone actually understands retail anymore, it would be Amazon, which decided to buy Whole Foods Market, which is building a very large new store in Harbor East. Good for them.

And for something a bit more bourgeois bohemian, there's the Broadway corridor in Upper Fells Point, where the strong Latino influence has already withstood the trappings of gentrification. Along with Amazon, ethnic groups seem to have the greatest semblance of understanding urban retail. The Broadway Market has a long woeful tale of attempted renovation similar to Harborplace, but the future should be bright.

In sum, the Inner Harbor has had its heyday. It needs to grow old gracefully and let other places have their share of attention. This too shall pass.

The moral is to invest in intrinsic improvements that genuinely increase value, and don't just feed someone's quixotic or idiosyncratic visions. Real problems need to be solved, like access and traffic conflicts, instead of playing zero-sum games. Was getting rid of McKeldin Fountain really that important? Will a new Rash Field really be a "game changer"? The simple answer is "no".

A strong feasible transformative project that would actually be successful is to narrow down Light Street to what it should have been in the first place.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of Baltimore's Inner Harbor experience is what we can learn from it, as attention moves onward to Harbor Point, Port Covington and the rest of the city. When all is said and done, despite its history of hype, Harborplace will be just a place on the harbor.