How to save Harborplace: Make it a neighborhood

From its opening in 1980, Harborplace was an international success story. So what went wrong? Harborplace's big strength was also its big weakness. It was built by a suburban developer, James Rouse, as a little piece of suburbia in the center of the city where suburbanites and visitors would feel safe experiencing the city. But since then, neighborhoods in the real city have emerged to fulfill this role in a far more authentic way. Now it's time for Harborplace to emulate the neighborhoods.

Pratt Street Pavilion of Harborplace - Its pedestrian bridge over Pratt Street should be extended over South Street to a new high rise/low rise residential complex (shown in gold).

Finding the right tenant and land use mix

Hopefully, retail gurus are already busy trying to identify a tenant mix that can fill Harborplace's mostly empty space - a civic embarrassment where once was a "festival marketplace" that made international news for success and innovation. Hopefully, they're looking at its retail forerunners such as Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, Faneuil Hall in Boston and the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, as well as countless subsequent imitators, some of which have since gone defunct, to figure out what will work in the 2020s and what won't.

But as much as retail has changed in the forty years since 1980 when Harborplace was new, Baltimore has changed even more. Back then, there wasn't an important distinction between being innovative and being fake. The Inner Harbor was supposed to be a world apart from the rest of the city. This wasn't really just a calculated way to build it. It was the only way to build it and it was the right site to build it on.

The biggest change in those forty years affecting Harborplace as a place was the emergence of real neighborhoods that served the same role that Harborplace originally served. The most successful of these neighborhoods have been Federal Hill, Fells Point, Canton, Hampden and finally, Harbor East, which has been touted as the "new downtown".

Harborplace then responded by going for national chain retail and restaurants, which might have been OK except the city then also added even more retail space along Pratt Street, Market Place and in the Power Plant, which in the long run has all been impossible to keep filled. Then they planned even more retail space in the Transamerica plaza (formerly USF&G) and the Convention Center, plans which could hardly have been more wrong for the time.

The main advantage of the neighborhoods is that they have been able to experience their growth in a mostly organic way, without relying on adhering to master plans that leave little margin for error. The amount of retail and other commercial space in these neighborhoods, relative to residential space, has been open to constant adjustment and thus has been resistant to precipitous failures. Of course, there have been failures, notably the Hollins Market area, but these are mostly due to external forces.

But downtown and the Inner Harbor have recently had one very bright spot - the residential market has been booming. People like the idea of living downtown, even if downtown has not reacted very favorably to them. This mismatch is partly due to the fact that office and retail space still dominate even though it is underutilized.

Moreover, while planners have been coming up with huge "game changer" plans like a mega-arena Convention Center, a grand Pratt Street boulevard and a pedestrian drawbridge across the Inner Harbor, what they have ended up with are very weak half-hearted plans like tearing down the McKeldin Fountain to plant more grass, tweaking Light Street's excessive ten lane width instead of actually narrowing it and providing bike paths that are really just sidewalks. There is a huge disconnect between their vast ambitions and their results.

Downtown and the Inner Harbor need large comprehensive plans because there are so many forces and interactions at play. But big plans can translate into a big failures.

So regardless of what direction the city goes regarding the overall functioning of downtown and the Inner Harbor, individual projects need the kind of organic flexibility to respond like the neighborhoods do.

Harborplace must be open to accommodating everything from high powered national chains like H&M and the Cheesecake Factory, all the way down to unique mom 'n' pop shops to artist and craft studios and everything in between. It should attract tourists and it should attract residents. The residents should gawk at the tourists and the tourists should gawk at the residents.

But how do we stimulate these interactions? More residents in the closest possible proximity should be the catalyst.

The key to the proposed new residential complex (in gold) is orienting it to a "Main Street" style linear courtyard that is flexible enough to be anything from fully public to fully private with any mix of uses.

Architect's rendering of the building proposed for the site - a generic mixed-use high rise building which indicates they'll go in any direction the market demand takes them (MCB Real Estate).

How to make Harborplace a neighborhood

So here's a new plan: On the one remaining surface parking lot just across the street from the Harborplace Pratt Street Pavilion which is waiting to be developed, instead of building yet another freestanding office, hotel or residential tower, a complex should be designed and built to emulate a high density neighborhood.

This should include a direct connection from the pedestrian bridge above Pratt Street from Harborplace into a simulated "Main Street" environment that traverses the length of the site up toward Lombard Street. While this space should be designed to evoke a traditional urban "Main Street", flanked by a high and low rise buildings, it should not be locked into any particular functions.

Overhead walkways are currently out of favor with urban designers, but that is mainly due to a lack of commitment to making them work. The above-ground environment needs to focus on its own "ecology", and not simply be some kind of extension of what is below on street level. It needs to be a completely new self-contained environment.

The objective of this space should be to allow adjacent Harborplace to function as much like a neighborhood as desired and necessary. Therefore, flexibility is important. It should also add significant value to the new development. No other residential property in the city has a direct linkage to anything as "iconic" as Harborplace, at the heart of the Inner Harbor.

Such simulated "Main Streets" were already the next iteration of suburban retail design after "festival marketplaces" and shopping malls, and are typified by The Avenue at White Marsh and somewhat more timidly by Canton Crossing.

Residential complexes often have outdoor courtyards, but they are usually very private and not patterned after a very public "Main Street". The Scarlett Place condo complex in the Inner Harbor between Pier 6 and President Street has an above-street courtyard, with a prominent and public looking stairway down to the public Jones Falls promenade and Columbus Piazza. The Scarlett Place courtyard looks great, but is very poorly designed. It is not well oriented to the residential complex itself, so while the design aims for flexibility, what it creates is ambiguity, which is the worst problem for attempting to achieve "defensible space".

Another nearby attempt at an above-street public courtyard is at the Verizon office building at Light and Pratt Street, which predates Harborplace from the 1970s, and has been groping for an identity ever since. It had overhead linkages to both the Convention Center and Harborplace and so was poised to be a very public thru-space, originally even having pretentions to being a Ghirardelli Square style retail complex, but never had the flexibility to find its place. It has now become mostly private, mostly by default.

The new "Main Street" at Harborplace can be designed in a far clearer and more flexible manner. It needs prominent entrances to all buildings. It should be designed to fully support any kind of retail, from resident conveniences to restaurants to artist studios to whatever, or none at all. It should be readily adaptable to being fully private or fully public or anything in between. By being part of a mostly residential complex, this should be achievable.

It's overarching role should simply be to serve Harborplace, particularly to support any kind of new functions and uses that anyone may dream up for the forty year old complex, in the clearest and strongest manner possible, as the entire world of retail continues to be redefined. This new complex will create a reservoir of residents to create a human "real world" identity for whatever happens - which is actually what we want any urban  neighborhood to do.

Birdseye aerial view showing above street-level linkage between Harborplace Pratt Street Pavilion, the Gallery at Harborplace retail/hotel complex (upper left) and the proposed "Main Street" residential complex (in gold, upper center).

Providing new direction for the rest of the Inner Harbor

All this can then set a new tone for the entire Inner Harbor, which despite a stream of egotistical plans, no longer appears to have any direction at all. This problem is most clearly illustrated by the petulant destruction of the McKeldin Fountain, only to be replaced by a new isolated space seemingly designed only to be a campground for the homeless. 

There's also the new replacement for the building on the Constellation Dock, which hardly anyone wanted in the first place. Just a few weeks before the signs said it was scheduled to be completed, they were still in the "site prep" phase and construction had not really even begun. They finally stuck a "1" over the "0" so the the scheduled completion would be "September 2021" instead of "September 2020".

This aimlessness is further typified by the aborted reboot of Harborplace itself several years ago for larger footprint tenants that would have greater direct access from outside the building, particularly direct access from Pratt Street. Retailers hate having front doors on opposite ends of their stores. This hardly ever works, and was made even more impossible here because the Pratt Street frontage of Harborplace still looks and smells like the building's garbage dump. This is truly pathetic.

Part of the problem is Pratt and Light Street themselves. They should be reconfigured to fully accommodate local functions while still handling their very heavy traffic loads. The city's previous plans to make it into a two-way boulevard a la Conway Street predictably appear to be dead, which is good riddance from the standpoints of both traffic and pedestrians.

Fixing the larger Light Street Pavilion of Harborplace will be an even more daunting challenge than fixing the Pratt Street pavilion, but success must be found where it can, before we can spread it around. The recent closure of the cheesy "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" Museum illustrates the problem, but hopefully also creates new opportunities for solutions.

The Inner Harbor's basic problem is that it has just become a stew for anything anybody wants - a bit of this, a bit of that. Instead, the city needs to make it a neighborhood. This puts the onus on the urban designers and architects to design something which will organically allow it to become whatever kind of place the Inner Harbor itself wants to be.

Related Article Links:

 Fixing Preston Gardens to create a true neighborhood

 No Inner Harbor "End Game" for dormant Harborplace

 Get rid of wide Light Street from a past that never was

 A new park from Questar Tower to McKeldin Fountain

Five ways candidates should embrace city's future

The same old answers aren't going to work for candidates in the city's upcoming election. So here is a guide to show them how to get beyond the current rhetoric about urban symptoms like crime and corruption to make a real physical difference in the future of Baltimore. Voters can then compare this to what the candidates are promising and decide who to support. Here are five ways Baltimore can turn the corner and embrace the future:

A possible new Circulator Bus non-profit authority district

1 - Replace and expand Charm City Circulator Bus System

The Charm City Circulator bus system is the perfect example of how this city is spending too much of our tax dollars in favor downtown and the privileged neighborhoods, to the detriment of the rest of the city. Moreover, the city does not run the system very well. A state official described the city's system as being in a "death spiral" of reduced service and aging buses. Moreover, it has become part of a crazy quilt of redundancy that competes with existing MTA bus service and a slew of private shuttles run by institutions such as colleges and businesses such as Amazon.

The solution is to create a new organization that will consolidate all of these public and private circulators and shuttles into a new integrated localized system which serves everyone. It would be funded by those who really have "skin in the game" - the same institutions who are now spending money to benefit only a small segment of the transit market. This would then enable the state-run MTA system to focus on areas not served by the shuttles and to strengthen its system of transit transfer hubs, instead of dealing with unfair and destructive competition with free buses.

Read more in this 2015 blog post:  https://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-to-sort-out-bus-system-circulator.html

Possible new diverse income housing on the Cherry Hill waterfront

2 - Create mixed-income developments in lower income areas that really work

There's a lot of talk about "Two Baltimores", rich and poor, but investment in mixed-income developments really hasn't worked well in virtually any part of the city.

For many decades, there's been a lot of money thrown at providing low income housing, from the high-rise projects of the 1950s through the huge Sandtown project by the Enterprise Foundation in the 1990s, but the overall result has been that the city has been losing rather than gaining low income housing. Two of the problems in this, bad design and lack of diversity, have since been rectified in more recent mixed-income projects such as Heritage Crossing, Albemarle Square and Center West, but this has not been nearly enough to make them catalysts to stem blight in their surrounding areas.

Albemarle Square, which replaced the Flag House Courts high rises just north of Little Italy and east of downtown, has almost all the ingredients of success - a near ideal location, good design and a mix of low and middle income units, but the adjacent Corned Beef Row and Jonestown areas are now even more vacant and blighted than ever. Major institutions such as the Jewish Museum, National Aquarium and Ronald McDonald House have only helped a little. And this is an area located squarely in the so-called "White L" of affluence and privilege.

The basic problem is that property values in surrounding areas are still too low to justify adequate investment and maintenance. Higher income "residents by choice" still avoid these surrounding areas, creating isolated islands of development. Even moderately higher income people will only live there if it's cheaper than their alternatives. This creates an escalation of subsidies, not only for the low income residents who actually need subsidies, but also for those with higher incomes as well. It has also seriously curtailed the ability to support non-residential uses, particularly strong retail, which is essential to creating viable urban communities and attracting "choice" residents. The result is more disinvestment, not investment.

The solution is to identify and invest in low income areas where major value can actually be added. The north side of Carroll Park adjacent to the Mount Clare neighborhood is a prime example. Carroll Park is magnificent and is next to the world class B&O Railroad Museum and the higher income Union Square neighborhood, but Mount Clare is crumbling from neglect. Another example is next to the even more magnificent Druid Hill Park where Reservoir Hill intersects the Greater Mondawmin neighborhood. The Westport and Cherry Hill waterfronts are other clear examples. None of these are in the so-called "White L".

Gentrification? That's not a significant issue in a city as non-diverse as Baltimore which has lost over a third of its population.

Read more in many articles throughout this blog, such as:
 https://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2017/07/green-network-part-1-four-priority_10.html

Possible neighborhood down in the ditch where the "Highway to Nowhere" is now,
leaving room for a revival of the Red Line plan (Marc Szarkowski).

3 - Get rid of the "Highway to Nowhere" once and for all

Why can't the city admit that this useless ill-fated stub of an Interstate Highway is a cancer that must be fully removed from West Baltimore? The charades started in the 1970s before construction even began with visions of "capping it over" to create development lots that would be far more expensive than their dubious value. Then the ill-fated light rail Red Line stuck in its median strip was supposed to add the value, but of course, it never did. Payson Street was extended across the highway through a pair of obnoxious high speed intersections, but that didn't help much, and now there's talking of doing the same with Fremont Avenue.

Now the focus has turned to doing something with the huge abandoned Metro West complex formerly occupied by the Social Security Administration. Even this project has not raised calls to get rid of the highway. The plan still appears to be to keep the highway, but knock down the bridges over MLK Boulevard to simply move all the traffic to the surface intersections. But the problem is not the connections across the highway - it's the highway itself.

Redeveloping Metro West is an important project, but only if it is an opportunity to integrate it with all of West Baltimore, notably Heritage Crossing, Lafayette Square, Harlem Park and Poppleton. The unconflicted connections left by the highway bridges may be the best way to add value to really make the project work. And perhaps moving the much of the State Center office space to Metro West is the way to get it going.

Read more in many articles throughout this blog, such as:
 https://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-low-line.html

Historic architecture on Lafayette Square surrounded by squalor that needs to be treasured

4 - Get serious about historic preservation

Baltimore's glorious but often tumultuous history is the main thing that sets it apart from the suburbs and gives us our soul and identity. This is especially so in the African American communities where this history has never been fully told or has even been largely forgotten. The center of this history is Upton, where some residents longingly remember the destroyed Royal Theater, Freedom House and other vestiges of the past, while others are busy plotting to knock down even more of this heritage such as the row of houses where Cab Calloway grew up.

Upton has a proud past and should have everything going for it in the future - a great location, a subway station and distinctive architecture. All it needs is an intelligent historic preservation plan to add to its value. Instead, we get a city that simply wants to knock down the irreplaceable buildings, to add to the portfolio of vacant lots, failed parks and sporadically located modern ticky tacky rowhouses that could be from anywhere, USA.

Without preservation, Upton will no longer be Upton. It will just be part of the continuing depopulation of the city that began half a century ago. Next stop: Lafayette Square.

Possible MagLev Station on the downtown Post Office site across the street from the Shot Tower
 at the end of the Jones Falls Expressway

5 - Tune in to the Magnetic Levitation high speed rail project

A consortium of investors in the US and Japan want to build a 300 mph MagLev system from Washington, DC to New York, with a first phase that would terminate in Baltimore. They've gotten the federal government involved and have submitted major portions of the environmental impact review process. If this project happens, Baltimore would suddenly be a mere 15 minutes from downtown Washington and at the cutting-edge of 21st century transportation.

Baltimore doesn't really need to do much to push this project, but we do need to watch it closely and get involved. The consortium really doesn't seem to care much about Baltimore, except for it being the place where the first phase would end and be evaluated on the way to phase two. They've selected BWI-Marshall Airport as a first station, a choice that would maintain a high profile for the project without much additional risk. This might help reveal the impact of MagLev on air travel, but DC already has Reagan National Airport as the choice of air travelers for whom convenience is the priority.

In contrast, Baltimore is where the impact of MagLev could be profound. Underneath Camden Yards was the project's early station choice. Now Cherry Hill is being favored, because they think they could build the station there less expensively above ground. The downtown option has shifted to the site of the Garmatz Federal Building on Pratt Street. But the alternatives are highly fluid because very little of the project would be above ground, with the major constraints being constructability and the need for a straight alignment that would enable vehicles to maintain maximum speed. Two other options could be in the vicinity of Charles Center and the Shot Tower, but these have not been studied.

The city has not been asked to pay for anything on this project. So in the aftermath of the city's hangover from the failed Red Line light rail project, why has their been so little interest in a far larger project that would dramatically vault Baltimore to the front of the international transportation stage?

Read more in these blog posts:

 https://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2019/12/maglev-station-should-cross-street-into.html

 https://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-shot-tower-maglev-station-would.html

Baltimore has fared badly from overhyping potential "game changer" projects from the Grand Prix to the Horseshoe Casino to Port Covington and the Red Line, but the city's need for big ideas is as strong as ever. Our future depends on it.