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