Stacy Keibler at Penn Station

Penn Station: A new more popular Man-Woman Statue

After her recent universally acclaimed Oscar performance as George Clooney's arm candy, Stacy Keibler is now undoubtedly the world's most famous Baltimorean. So what could be a better follow up role than replacement of the reviled Man-Woman Statue in front of Penn Station?

A Town Square for North Avenue

The North Avenue space shown in green could be transformed into an elongated Town Square - looking west from the Centre Theatre (right) toward Charles Street and Maryland Avenue.

Now that the potentially dazzlingly moderne Centre Theatre on North Avenue near Charles Street has recently been announced for renovation, it's time to unify North Avenue's streetscapes into a Town Square, modelled after Canton's O'Donnell Square. Right now, North Avenue brutally slices through the area, creating a barrier which has served to spread blight over its entire length from east to west Baltimore. But as the widest section of Baltimore's widest east-west thoroughfare, it offers the greatest potential for reinvention as a central focal point.

The Station North neighborhood is also oriented far more to the north and south than to east and west. Thus the linkage to Penn Station, University of Baltimore, MICA, Downtown, Charles Village and Hopkins University would be enhanced by reducing the east-west expanse of North Avenue.

Widening and redesigning the median

The most offending element is the median strip, which makes North Avenue's extravagant width work against it, causing as much congestion as it relieves. The overall curb-to-curb street width of up to 100 feet or more requires long pedestrian "Walk" signal phases, which in turn requires long cycle lengths, which in turn increases vehicle stacking and delays.

The current North Avenue median is a wasted space occupied by a dense thicket of evergreen bushes.

North Avenue needs to be narrowed for the sake of both people and traffic, as well as their mutual interaction. The easiest, quickest and least expensive way to do this would be to leave the outer curbs alone, with their extensive and drain inlets, and focus on adjusting the median.

Baltimore has seen various attempts to make urban medians into people places. At McKeldin Square (Light Street) and Preston Gardens (St. Paul Street), this has been done in wide and extravagant but failed fashions. Now both are scheduled to be rebuilt yet again to atone for past urban design mistakes. A much more modest rebuild was done to the Broadway median in Upper Fells Point. At only about 16 to 32 feet in width (with or without the parking lanes), the Broadway median was still able to be transformed into an inviting linear pedestrian area.

O'Donnell Street in Canton is the best model for a median that looks and functions like a people place instead of a median. This is what North Avenue should aspire to, albeit in a somewhat narrower and longer configuration.

Creating a median that does not feel like a median

But the city's most successful urban median is O'Donnell Square in Canton, because it does not look or feel like a median at all. O'Donnell Street looks and operates like two separate streets, one eastbound and one westbound, with an inviting park in between. Putting the park between two such traffic arteries makes it as prominently public as possible. There is no possibility of the kind of public-private ambiguity seen elsewhere that can make parks into less defensible spaces. (The very public nature of McKeldin Square was why it worked for Occupy Baltimore even though it has largely failed as a park.) However, that's easier to do it with that median in Canton (80 feet width) than it would be at North Avenue, which can probably only be widened to a maximum of 40 to 50 feet.

Making east-west North Avenue feel more like two narrow streets than one wide one would be consistent with the corridor's overwhelming north-south orientation, and overcome the "barrier" effect. Hopefully, the resulting effect would function in a manner somewhere between Broadway and O'Donnell Street. But another problem is that North Avenue carries far more traffic than either of those other streets.

Having traffic coexist with a wider and more people-oriented median would require overcoming a combination of operational and psychological factors. Psychologically, it is important that pedestrians would perceive that the North Avenue median is not a mere "safety island" between the eastbound and westbound traffic flows. Pedestrians always want to cross such wide streets in one "Walk" signal phase, and when they can't, they feel very uncomfortable stranded in the middle. That's one reason why North Avenue, MLK Boulevard, President Street, Conway Street and other wide streets are such pedestrian failures.

Making the signal timing work

It's also why people tend to campaign for longer and longer "Walk" signal times, even though that also requires increasing the "Don't Walk" for one or more other crossings as well, resulting in pressure to increase overall signal cycle times. On the contrary, the best traffic/pedestrian environment is achieved when signal cycle lengths are minimized. Pedestrians should only have to wait through a brief "Don't Walk" and as soon as "Walk" comes up, they just walk, without worrying how long it will take. Countdown pedestrian signals are invaluable in reducing the anxiety, but motorists also need to be conditioned that once pedestrians are in a crosswalk, it belongs to them.

To make this work, pedestrians need to feel comfortable crossing only half of North Avenue at a time, and feel naturally at home when they get to the Town Square park in the median. The park must feel inviting and not be perceived as just an island.

Reducing the signal cycle lengths are also important to get traffic to cooperate. With fewer cars per signal cycle, the goal should be to eliminate the left turn lanes and green turn arrows, and have cars stay in the median space while waiting to turn left across opposing traffic. If this does not work, left turns would need to be prohibited during peak hours. It is also important to improve timing coordination between signals at adjacent intersections. North Avenue should thus be reducible to two lanes in each direction, which is the same as most of the rest of North Avenue throughout east and west Baltimore. It may also help to designate a double left turn lane from westbound North Avenue to southbound St. Paul Street, just east of the Town Square, to divert traffic and provide additional capacity just prior to the widened Town Square Park median.

Overview of the space that a North Avenue Town Square could occupy between Maryland Avenue (upper left), Charles Street (center) and St. Paul Street (right).

Putting it all together

By doing all this, the North Avenue median can hopefully be widened to around 50 feet between Maryland Avenue and Charles Street and about 38 feet in width between Charles and St. Paul Street. This should be wide enough to create a successful North Avenue Town Square Park. However, this will pose a challenge for the urban designers as well as for traffic planners and engineers, since it will still be far less than the 80 feet width in Canton's O'Donnell Square Park.

But North Avenue thirsts for such a highly visible and truly public urban square far more than does Canton, which is blessed with the waterfront promenade and several other major open spaces mere blocks away, including Patterson Park.

The benefits of a North Avenue Town Square are sufficiently great that it would be well worth taking maximum advantage of the opportunities available.

A Red Line plan to Exelon and Harbor Point

The Red Line's east terminus could be shifted to the heart of Harbor Point (lower right), at Exelon near Fells Point. Proposed streetcar lines are shown in yellow, existing subway in green and light rail in blue.

The recent decision to build the massive Exelon office complex in Harbor Point confirms downtown's strong eastward shift, and has rendered MTA's rail transit planning largely obsolete. Even more, it is a sign of the end of downtown as the central hub of a larger region. Major companies are no longer choosing downtown because of regional geographic advantages. While it is as necessary as ever for downtown to be the connecting hub for transit lines, suburb-to-downtown commutes represent a increasingly insignificant share of all trips.

In 2009, I devised a plan which anticipates and reflects for this. It would cost far less and do much more than the MTA's multi-billion dollar Red Line plan.

The MTA's Red Line plan is increasingly irrelevant

The elusive and fickle focus of downtown activity has been and still is a major problem for transit planners, and is probably the number one factor in Baltimore's failure to grow around its transit system. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Howard/Lexington retail district was downtown's most active place, and was an extremely important station location in the proposed rail transit system. But by the time the first rail leg was completed in the mid '80s, the retail district was already in serious decline. The MTA then doubled-down on its bet with the light rail system focused on adjacent Howard Street as well, which only made the decline even more precipitous.

The Red Line, originally devised around 2001, scrupulously attempted to avoid this problem by locating in the hottest areas along the Inner Harbor, Fells Point and Canton. But now even those areas are getting far less attention, with the Inner Harbor spurned by Exelon, and Fells Point and Canton in a state of stable low-growth maturity, with Canton Crossing being built in a very auto-dominated manner.

Transit-oriented development has been a consistently auspicious flop in Baltimore. It actually appears that developers go out of their way to avoid transit. And Exelon's recent decision to build at Harbor Point, on an isolated peninsula that is about as far away from the transit system as they could get, is perhaps the best example yet.

The new Morgan Stanley building near the proposed Exelon building at Harbor Point, auto-oriented and isolated from the rest of downtown.

But to some extent, it's not just that developers are just avoiding transit, but that they are avoiding the whole traditional concept of downtown in the region. The suburbs are increasingly self-sufficient and auto-dominant, not tied to the classic suburb to downtown commute. Both the city and the suburbs are increasingly tied into a much larger super-region which revolves far more around Washington DC and even the northeast corridor of the U.S. as a whole.

As with Morgan Stanley and Legg Mason, Exelon saw no significant advantage to being in the hub of downtown, just as UnderArmour similarly decided in its recent decision to locate its corporate campus headquarters in Locust Point, again about as far from transit as possible.

Increasingly, downtown is just an environment and a lifestyle, based on the unique attributes of the waterfront, historic architecture and high density interaction, but not the hub of anything.

Regional access is still important, but mostly just to create the linkages of a true transit system, not as an end hub in itself. It is important that the rail transit system have a true backbone, to create a logical organizational structure. Downtown is the place where transit riders transfer between the system's bus and rail lines. The system's rail "trunk" must be as fast and efficient as possible. The Mondawmin Metro Station is the system's one very successful example of this, where myriad bus lines converge with easy transfers to the much faster and more efficient Metro. But the rest of the system fails to compliment this.

The MTA's proposed Red Line would only make matters worse, not even connecting to the Metro except through a two block long pedestrian tunnel. It's also too slow for such a long line (over 14 miles) as it meanders between far east and west Baltimore.

The fact that the rail system does not even serve Harbor Point as the new downtown growth center further adds to the problems. And the isolation of Harbor Point emphasizes its lack of spin-off development opportunities. Harbor Point would be about a third of a mile from the closest Red Line station, and that is contingent upon building a controversial Central Avenue bridge which would cut off the Living Classrooms campus from the harbor. If the rail system itself is not a catalyst for redevelopment, as demonstrated on Howard Street, and isolated Harbor Point is not either, one of rail transit's biggest selling points of being an agent for growth vanishes.

The Red Line tries to serve the system and to enhance development opportunities, and ends up doing a very poor job of both.

Running the Red Line straight into Harbor Point instead

The solution is a rail transit plan that puts connectivity first, then relies on a system hierarchy from fast heavy rail to medium speed light rail to local streetcars to create and support development opportunities, and acknowledges that what was once known as downtown is now too dispersed to serve in any other way.

In such a plan, the Red Line would be located in a very short tunnel under Fayette Street, where it would be close enough to the Charles Center Metro station and Howard/Lexington retail district and light rail line for optimum connections. The very short tunnel would extend only from about MLK Boulevard to Gay Street (near City Hall), greatly reducing its cost and increasing its flexibility. It could even be built to accommodate buses as well, like the Seattle system, as well as an extension of the existing central light rail line from Penn Station through the Jones Falls corridor.

East of the tunnel, the Red Line would turn into Central Avenue, and proceed to a terminus in the heart of Harbor Point, immediately adjacent to Exelon, the recently completed Morgan Stanley building and the west edge of Fells Point near Thames Street.

Sojourner-Douglass college is one of a few signs of life along Central Avenue near Fayette Street, looking south toward Harbor East and Harbor Point along a potential Red Line alignment.

A whole new transit-oriented corridor would open up along Central Avenue between Sojourner-Douglass College and Harbor Point. The proposed bridge into Harbor Point could be designed as a high arch for transit   vehicles rather than cars, which would create a distinctive attraction and still let Living Classrooms boats go underneath. Pedestrians could also be accommodated secondarily.

The portion of the Red Line from the Inner Harbor to Canton, Highlandtown and Bayview would then be built as a streetcar line, linked to the proposed Charles Street Trolley system, as well as to the light and heavy rail lines, with the alignments optimized for the increasingly important localized rather than longer regional trips. As such, the streetcars would far more conveniently traverse Pratt Street and Piers 5 and 6 directly through the Inner Harbor rather than buried under auto-dominated Lombard Street.

All of this would cost far less than the $2.2 billion Red Line, because of the drastic reduction of counterproductive tunneling, and serve far more. And perhaps even more importantly, the system could far more easily and feasibly be built in affordable stages rather than all at once.

Such a system would reflect what most people, including Exelon and their local Constellation Energy division, already realize - That downtown is increasingly an environment and a lifestyle rather than the traditional geographic entity, which can only capitalize on transit which is integrated conveniently and attractively into the landscape, rather than built into expensive, outmoded and isolated tunnels such as with the MTA's proposed Red Line.

Exelon in Westport

Give it up, Downtown Partnership -
Put Exelon in Westport

Patrick Turner's proposed Westport development on the Middle Branch, near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway

It's a municipal wet dream. A Fortune 200 company plans to build a major new office building, an investment of hundreds of millions, and they're only considering one city - Baltimore.


So Kirby Fowler, President of the Downtown Partnership, writes in the Baltimore Sun that the downtown business interests he represents do not want Exelon to build a new building, because there is already a glut of unwanted office space. And failing that, they want only downtown sites to be considered, even though he admits that locating there would require massive tax subsidies as an inducement that Exelon is not even demanding.

Key Highway / Light Street Update

An intersection design that actually works -

Without the drama

The intersection of Key Highway and Light Street is totally inappropriate for a roundabout. Here's a simple design solution that actually works. Essentially, the two existing islands on Key Highway and Light Street would simply be enlarged to tighten up the intersection of northbound Light Street and the southbound left turn movement that crosses over it. This very tight intersection with minimum length pedestrian crosswalks would be controlled by a simple two-phase traffic signal. Pedestrians would cross Key Highway while Light Street through traffic moves, and would cross Light Street while Key Highway traffic moves - so simple even a BC-DOT employee could do it.

A third median island would then be constructed to totally remove southbound Light Street from the intersection. This island would start at Montgomery Street and extend as far north as desired. Essentially southbound Light Street would function as a quiet single-lane local service road with parking and any other appropriate desired traffic calming measures such as speed humps and "Stop for Pedestrians" pylons. It would also be possible to extend the southbound Light Street island separating "arterial" traffic destined for Key Highway and "local " traffic destined for Federal Hill as far north as Conway Street. While this would be an excellent way of minimizing the heavy traffic exposure on the adjacent land uses (Christ Church Apartments, Harbor Court Condos/Hotel), it would tend to make this seem like a permanent solution.

This design should be much cheaper than a roundabout. The railroad track wouldn't even need to be removed, unless the city wanted to. It would probably be preferable to keep this as cheap as possible, in keeping with the idea that it would only be temporary until the city comes to its senses and decides to create a more permanent solution with a narrower Light Street along the entire Inner Harbor.

Proposed intersection design, with a new median island starting at the Montgomery Street intersection (left/south end) to totally separate southbound Light Street through traffic from the Key Highway intersection. This median could be extended as far north (right) as desired. The two existing islands (center) would also be enlarged, with a new "bump out" (center left) to tighten up the remaining intersection as much as possible. The Science Center is at the lower right.

Roundabout at Key Highway / Light Street

An Inner Harbor roundabout for all the wrong reasons

The real problem is that Light Street is about twice as wide as it should be. A roundabout at the end of this stretch of the Inner Harbor in front of the Science Center (upper left) would only add to its problems.

The only good thing that can be said about the city's latest proposal for a roundabout at the intersection of Key Highway and Light Street is that there is plenty of space for it. But it would be just another Inner Harbor doo-dad that ignores actual traffic conditions and long-term needs.

Mount Vernon vs. Jones Falls Bikeway

Desolate Jones Falls Bikeway blows opportunity to create a livable Mount Vernon neighborhood

Bikeway now under construction is wedged between the desolation of the Prison District (left) and the Jones Falls Expressway. (The MTA hasn't bothered to move their bus stop out of the way yet.) 

Trying to make the city safer for cyclists sounds like a laudable goal, but the city has once again shown that it is oblivious to its most important priority - neighborhoods.

 Mount Vernon has been clamoring for decades for relief from traffic. Simply, it cannot become a normal cohesive neighborhood as long as many tens of thousands of cars descend daily upon its tight residential streets. Bicyclists have been among the greatest victims. Bikes should be an ideal transportation mode for the historic high density neighborhood, except that the streets are overwhelmed by cars.

The solution is straightforward: Divert as much traffic as possible into the underutilized Jones Falls corridor just to the east, to free up the local residential streets for humans, bikes, and above all, peace and quiet. But the city has never seen fit to do any of that.

The city's latest solution is to move the bikes out of the community, not the cars. The community will continue to suffer while their potential two-wheeled allies flee. Mount Vernon will continue to be squeezed as monster parking garages increasingly become the primary transportation option, even for so-called "transit-oriented development" serving the University of Baltimore, which ought to be a natural ally for bikes and livability.

Residential St. Paul Street in Mount Vernon is taken over by noisy obnoxious traffic, which is why the city is putting the new bikeway in the "solitude" next to the prison and expressway.

If the Jones Falls corridor was any kind of decent environment for bikes, maybe it would justify pushing them out of the community. But this is the Prison District, in the shadow of the imposing Jones Falls Expressway, not a place with urban charm. And while the traffic volume is low, it also tends to move as fast as possible, taking advantage of the desolation as cars weave on and off the expressway or dodge the other traffic doing so.

And the bikeway now under construction combines the worst aspects of bikes on sidewalks and on exclusive bike lanes. It separates the bikes as much as possible, but not at the inevitable intersection conflict points where there are strong opportunities for cars to hook in front of bikes, and for bikes to intimidate the few pedestrians who must walk in this forbidding environment. This can have tragic results.

Car turning right in conflict with the bikeway at Fallsway/Eager next to the prison. The new cobblestone barrier forces turning vehicles to cross over the bikeway, mostly at excessive speed. 

Conditions will be even worse beyond the exclusive bikeway segments now under construction. One of the reasons this bike route has never been established up until now is that there are some truly horrible intersections as the expressway transitions into downtown. Right now, one can only imagine the bastardized intersection configurations that will emerge as the bike route is completed to the Inner Harbor in the next year or two.

Beyond that, the city has a more "permanent" longer range plan for Pratt Street adjacent to the Inner Harbor which includes a truly dangerous bike lane segregated from traffic except at the driveways and intersections, where it would be a death trap. The worst of these locations is at Pratt and President Streets, where the segregated Pratt Street bike lane is proposed as just dumping unceremoniously into the southwest quadrant of the intersection at the point of the extremely heavy eastbound to southbound right turn movement heading to Harbor East and Fells Point. Here's the plan, including a pretty picture labeled "Pratt & President 'after" which conveniently cuts off the deadly intersection.

It is unlikely that this more extensive long-range Inner Harbor street plan (including Light Street) will be done anytime soon, however, due to its cost, but more importantly due to the city's preoccupation with the struggling Baltimore Grand Prix. Bikes may be higher on the city's current pecking order than people and communities, but 175 mph Grand Prix racers trump all. The race course does not extend this far east, but does include Light Street and its intersection with Pratt just to the west.

Without livable neighborhoods, all the city's other goals fade into insignificance. If urban communities like Mount Vernon are not made attractive as places to live, the city's lofty plans for downtown, the Inner Harbor, and an extensive bikeway system will only isolated elements for hype with little potential for long term growth.

St. Paul Street trafficway in Mount Vernon neighborhood. Penn Station is two blocks away in the background.

The city should concentrate as much heavy traffic as possible into corridors like the Jones Falls - on the expressway as well as next to it. Then the city should focus on creating calm, normal, livable environments in its neighborhoods and "people places" like around the Inner Harbor. This is best for traffic, best for bikes and best for people. If this is not done, all will become increasingly dysfunctional.

Isn't it better to ride a bike through a calm, healthy urban neighborhood than on a bike lane sandwiched between a prison and an expressway?

Ripley's Believe It or Harborplace

Ripley in Harborplace? Believe it or Not!
Put it in Camden Yards instead


Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was right after all: Baltimore's recent Grand Prix was a "game changer". Or more accurately, the game has changed, and that crazy spectacle of 180 mph racecars careening around the Inner Harbor is now the Inner Harbor norm. Anything goes. And as the game changes, other incongruous scenes like a proposed Ferris Wheel, a billion dollar mega-arena convention center or a tent city encampment "occupying" McKeldin Square should be expected as opportunities present themselves.

In such an environment, a giant cartoon Chessie Monster adorning Harborplace would be consistent. Believe it or not, that is the question. Ripley's "Believe it or Not" Odditorium is the latest prospective client being wooed to Harborplace, Baltimore's front-and-center imagemaker.

Downtown Racetrack

A downtown racetrack:
An incredibly stupid idea that refuses to die

Google Earth image of Pimlico Racetrack superimposed over industrial community between Carroll Park (left) and Camden Yards (right), south of Ostend Street 


The idea of building a downtown Baltimore horse racing track has been bandied around by the usual suspects, our so-called business leaders, for almost a decade now, so it's time to put an end to it once and for all.


It takes only a tiny bit of scrutiny to expose this as totally absurd. It's so ridiculous, it would seem to be able to just die on its own, but it keeps crawling back like a cockroach you thought was dead.


The idea was recently raised again on September 28th in the back of a front page Sun article on "Maryland's Gambling Future", by a "longtime member" of the Maryland Racing Commission, John Fanzone, who said "he hopes the Stronach involvement with the Baltimore casino improves the prospect for a downtown racetrack."


Of course, Frank Stronach has long preached for replacing the venerable historic Pimlico Racetrack, while at the same time presiding over the steady deterioration of the Maryland horse racing industry. The Sun article also reminds us that Greg Avioli, who runs Stronach's track business, says that "downtown Baltimore is a strong possibility for a new racetrack."


In order to maintain at least a shred of plausibility for this idea, proponents avoid speaking of details. But back in 2004, Maryland Stadium Authority Chairman Carl A.J. Wright said "the best spot would be on 100 acres west of Russell Street and south of Ostend Street in the vicinity of the stadiums that are home to the city's two major professional sports teams", according to an article in the Daily Record from May 13, 2005.


So I prepared a quick Google Earth image showing how 100 acres of Pimlico racetrack would look as superimposed over such a site south of Ostend Street, which can just barely be squeezed between Carroll Park to the west and the CSX mainline train tracks to the east.


One hundred acres is a huge amount of land in such an urban setting. A racetrack on such a site would absolutely dominate southwest Baltimore, and displace a huge number of present businesses as well as preclude future businesses. Quite a bit of the Pigtown residential community would also be wiped off the face of the earth.


Here is a small sample of some of what would have to be eliminated, a residential block of Cleveland Street, an historic industrial building, and the Washington Boulevard frontage on Carroll Park:

Three Pigtown places that represent a small part of the 100 acres which would have to be wiped out to accommodate a proposed racetrack.


These are exactly the kinds of places that ought to represent Baltimore at its best, and that the city should be trying to nurture and cultivate, rather than threatening with a crazy racetrack scheme. No wonder Carroll Park and Pigtown have been unable to achieve their vast potential as an urban park and community, with things like this hanging over their head.  


Of course, the so-called business leaders always portray their schemes in a cloak of rationality. The Daily Record article has Donald Fry, Greater Baltimore Committee President and perennial purveyor of mega-schemes (such as the all-in-one Convention/Hotel/Arena and the multi-billion dollar transit Red Line) assuring us that while he favors a new government-sponsored racetrack, it would have to get a good return on investment - at least on paper, in the terms of one of their feasibility studies.


Somehow, these people seem to think that these schemes are the future of Baltimore - or at least downtown, or at least the part between downtown and Interstate 95 that allows people to escape without interacting with the vast rest of the city.


Wouldn't it be nice if these so-called business leaders could focus all their energies on actually improving business?


Please - once and for all - let's just kill the idea of a Pigtown Racetrack, doo-dah, doo-dah.

Hopkins Hospital North

Scorched-earth renewal north of Hopkins Hospital shows the problem with mega-projects

To Hopkins Hospital and the developers, the drastic multi-billion dollar 2002 plan wasn't working well enough. In an area that was supposed to get 1500 to 2000 new housing units, market rate housing sales have been virtually nil. That's why they did a new plan.

But to the community, the "old plan" worked all too well. It has wiped out virtually everything in a swath of about 25 square blocks between Hopkins, Broadway, the Amtrak tracks and Patterson Park Avenue. 

On the surface, it sounds like the same old classic conflicts of gentrification - the new and affluent pricing out the old. But this is not old-style incremental gentrification where a few bohemian pioneers move in, followed by yuppies and then finally bigtime developers. Here the big money was there from the start, with an upfront investment of hundreds of millions that have been judiciously spread around as necessary to deal with whatever and whoever stood in its path.

The fundamental problem is that the original plan did not add enough inherent new value to drive the redevelopment. The new development, basically institutional looking buildings and giant parking garages, have not lit the spark. So they've come up with a revised plan, complete with pretty pictures of the new buildings flanking green space and populated by shiny happy racially-neutral people. A decade later, that which pushes the trendy focus group-fueled buttons is somewhat different - more green space, farmers markets, and the whole livable, sustainable thing which has now entered the mainstream lexicon.

Everything and nothing changes

It's still very easy to paint this as a class conflict of rich versus poor, black versus white, and old versus new residents. But those are the same old issues which have been around for many years. The more recent question is why development has not taken off, even though most of the promises and investment were made well before the economy tanked in the past few years, and the health business has been the most recession-proof anyway.

The simple answer is that not enough new inherent value has been created. The old buildings have been demolished but the underlying urban dysfunction is still there. Being next to world-class Hopkins Hospital is simply not enough.

There is a clear lesson in this for all of Baltimore. Even the city's most absolutely attractive areas, with the most inherent value, have demanded redevelopment subsidies. Even Harbor East, located at the perfect confluence of the Inner Harbor and "gold coast", demanded subsidies. The Power Plant has demanded subsidies to attract new tenants. Harborplace is now in trouble. The Greater Baltimore Committee now cites the entire Inner Harbor and Convention Center as needing drastic new interventions to keep moving forward. Baltimoreans have been led to believe that these were our long-term success stories which were supposed to catalyze success elsewhere, but now even the helpers need help. Meanwhile, the rescue calls for Howard and Charles Street never seem to end. The Howard Street "superblock" lacks superpowers.

The loudest warning cry should be heard at State Center. Two major rail transit lines costing well over a billion dollars were supposed to be the spark to ignite "transit oriented development", and indeed two developments spurred by the state and dominated by massive parking garages (not by transit) have been built in Symphony Center and The Fitzgerald. Now the State wants to pour more billions into subsidizing a complete redevelopment.

But obviously if such subsidies are still needed after nothing has happened over the decades on its own, and State Center becomes a ghost town after the bureaucrats go home at 5 PM, the inherent value to drive development just isn't there. If it hasn't even worked around the Inner Harbor, how can it possibly work at State Center, Howard Street or Hopkins Hospital? As the opponents keep saying, massive State Center subsidies will merely drive down whatever dwindling downtown demand there might still be.

From the perspective of the poor, the great hope was supposed to be "Inclusionary Zoning". This stipulates that lower income housing must be incorporated into any new higher income project. It has been obvious to almost everyone that this makes no inherent economic sense, when it's already so difficult to build anything anyway, so a large house of economic cards has been set up around the law to try to make it work. But it hasn't.

The key is to create new added value

So what Baltimore needs is to create more inherent value - a reason to rebuild - beyond all the money being thrown at these areas. There are various aspects to this - economic, physical and social. Economically, our tax system is totally out of whack and must be fixed. Our leaders are painfully aware of this, even when they claim otherwise. This is demonstrated by the way they concoct massive subsidies, which merely bypass the onerous tax structure that otherwise kills new investment. 

Socially, we must recognize that the only institutions that are working well at all are those that revolve around real communities. Yes, hopelessly dysfunctional communities such as many low income housing projects needed to be destroyed. And yes, there have been some success stories where the poor escaped from the ghetto and assimilated with yuppies in high income communities. But Baltimore's best hope is to strengthen existing communities where they still exist, because that is where people have already invested themselves.

This area north of Hopkins Hospital was once a real rowhouse neighborhood

Baltimore already has many wonderful physical assets which are not fully being taken advantage of - such as parks, institutions, geographic features and irreplaceable historic architecture. Not one of these can work alone. Even mighty Hopkins Hospital can't save its surrounding community. Historic buildings can provide the spice and the visual focus, but not all the substance. The overhypedovermatched against the surrounding tide of decay.

It's a matter of making every dollar count, making it all visible and making it work. Baltimore can't keep rebuilding what we've already built until we get it exactly right, as with the Convention Center and hotel demolition. We must use our assets as they are.

Similarly, our heavy rail subway works fairly well, but there was a huge overreaction to its limitations when light rail was built a decade later. Now with the proposed Red Line, the MTA is still overreacting and overhyping - combining the disadvantages of heavy rail (cost and overdesign) with the disadvantages of light rail (lack of connections and rider "catchment" area, and underdesign). Instead, we need to make the most of what we already have.

The city's billion dollar plan to knock down the lower Jones Falls Expressway east of Mount Vernon is another example. The JFX works fairly well as-is and the surrounding area (including the prison district) has adapted to it. Why does the city want to knock down the JFX but still insists on preserving the cancerous west side "Highway to Nowhere"?

In sum, mega-projects simply don't work. We're finally realizing that even Charles Center and the Inner Harbor, whose legacy of breathless hype we have long believed, have their limitations. And that the response to these limitations should not be yet another mega-project.

They haven't saved the rest of the city. Baltimore needs to be smarter than that.

Camden Yards

Oriole Park at Camden Yards: 20 Year anniversary

The ballpark was revolutionary and the thousand foot long warehouse created a unique urban signature, but the rest of Camden Yards has still not fulfilled its potential as an urban space.


This month's Press Box magazine presents a nice twenty year retrospective of the "good old days" when Oriole Park at Camden Yards first opened. Yes, the design of Baltimore's ballpark really was as revolutionary as everyone has said. But just like the Orioles themselves, it's much nicer to remember Oriole Park's past then to contemplate its present of shrinking attendance and interest.

Camden Yards is no longer a sports leader

Let's face it: Since its 1992 opening, Baltimore has been left in the dust by many other major league cities, not just on the field but in terms of development surrounding the field. To name several, the new waterfront stadium settings in Pittsburgh and San Francisco embrace their cities' images even more than does our B&O Warehouse. And Baltimore's only major new nearby development has been the plain-Jane Hilton Hotel built by the city itself, which blocks much of the inside view, particularly of our wonderful historic Bromo Seltzer Tower. Among the others, Coors Field in Denver's LoDo neighborhood has sparked much more downtown and Platte riverfront revitalization than has Camden Yards.

Worse yet, Baltimore has since turned its back on building this kind of fine grained urban development, of the style that has demonstrated to be in complete harmony with urban ballparks as long ago as Boston's Fenway and Chicago's Wrigley built nearly a century ago. Twenty years ago, Baltimore proved it again when the high density Ridgely's Delight neighborhood continued to prosper directly across Russell Street from Oriole Park.

Baltimore started losing its way with new development when the Ravens' M&T Bank stadium was plopped down on the Camden Yards south parking lot a few years later, in the same kind of contextual vacuum that characterized 1960s-style "ashtray" stadiums built around the country such as Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. But yes, football is different from baseball, so perhaps this is excusable. Baltimore's football stadium works well enough even though no legends have grown up around it.

The proposed billion dollar convention center/arena/hotel/retail mega-complex
 is the present-day  equivalent of the multi-purpose "ashtray" stadium monstrosities
 built before Oriole Park at Camden Yards revolutionized stadium design.

Look at what they're pushing now

More distressing is what has been happening lately, with the Greater Baltimore Committee pushing their massive billion dollar combination arena, convention center, hotel, retail complex between Camden Yards and the Inner Harbor. This proposed mega-complex is so hopelessly way out of scale with everything around it, just like the proverbial million pound gorilla which promises to eat up everything in sight. This is a suburban fortress mentality. It's easy to compare such a facility to those 1960s-style combination baseball-football "ash tray" stadiums that were the bane of sports until Oriole Park came along.

It's also easy to detect the city's increasing desperation, in its efforts to build a slots casino just south of Camden Yards, no matter what kind of monstrosity might ultimately be proposed. Recently, city leaders have been banking more and more of the city's economic future on the slots project.

When you want a casino in the worst way, that's probably what you're going to get - the worst way. It looks increasingly like the city will not be able to say "no" to any design demand or shortcut proposed by a prospective slots developer. It cold easily end up as just another alien mega-barn plopped down south of the football stadium, built to maximize immediate payoffs and minimize costs, rather than being an element that will intelligently fit into a plan for urbanizing the entire area around Camden Yards.

Just look at the way the city has allowed the Grand Prix preparation to run roughshod over the Inner Harbor's streets and trees in preparing for the Labor Day weekend race, and that is a hint at how future plans promise to be dealt with.

Another recent proposal is for a branch of "Seacrets", a six acre mega-bar from Ocean City that has been talking to Westport developer Patrick Turner. Seacrets could become either a wonderful and compatible urban attraction, or just another loud, tacky community disruption. It's a strong signal of danger that a recent front page Sun article on Seacrets cited Westport, where it would be very difficult to assimilate into Turner's plan which has already won neighborhood approval, but did not mention the Gateway South casino area. Seacrets could certainly fit in better near the casino, if not for all the unspoken promises the city should be expected to make to the casino developer.

As the hype of economic justification of mega-projects because more and more convoluted and strident, without firm numbers of course, the future looks increasingly at risk.

A concept plan to urbanize Camden Yards prepared in 2010

 for an article in BaltimoreBrew.com with new development on parking lots

 and air rights oriented around a new urban street. 

Promoting true urbanization

This type of development desperation is needless. A casino, an arena, a convention center expansion, new hotels and other new urban development and amenities can easily be accommodated as part of a plan that integrates them into downtown and the city, and allows the entire private sector, large and small businesses alike, to maximize opportunities on an equal footing.

Camden Yards' expansive parking lots and highway and railroad "air rights" have tremendous potential for new development that could enable Baltimore to retake the leadership away from Pittsburgh, Denver, San Francisco and other cities as the best possible stadium environment. Furthermore, Gateway South and Westport, the areas south of Camden Yards along the Middle Branch waterfront, also have tremendous potential if the city doesn't blow it.

One of the impressions of the PressBox article is that stadium architect HOK breezed into Baltimore back in the 1980s and immediately presented its vision for what became Oriole Park at Camden Yards, dazzling everyone with its brilliance. But in reality, HOK had been architects for many of those "ashtray" stadiums built around the country, and they originally tried to sell the same thing to Baltimore.

But making Camden Yards a unique and valuable part of Baltimore was a local effort, not HOK's. This kind of local initiative is still needed now more than ever to ensure that Camden Yards, downtown, the Inner Harbor, Gateway South, Westport, and indeed the entire city is planned in a way that allows it to freely grow and prosper instead of merely catering to those who make demands on our will and resources.

North Avenue

Coppin campus planners weren't dumb. They put a pedestrian bridge over North Avenue even though urban designers hate those things. They didn't want to deal with the typical squalid, boarded-up failures of North Avenue

The key to fixing North Avenue:

De-emphasize it

Lou Fields, head of the African American Tourism Council of Maryland, wants to spearhead a revitalization movement for North Avenue, Baltimore's widest, straightest, most continuous and most troubled east-west artery, as chronicled in yesterday's Sun.

But he's way off-base in suggesting Pratt Street as role model.

Grand Prix

Despite Grand Prix glorification,
Baltimoreans are NOT adrenaline junkies

This is what the Inner Harbor will look like in a few weeks, as all the frantic preparation of the past year finally comes to culmination - Planners talk about "livability" and "sustainability", then give us 180 mph race cars. And that's just the latest in what they want.


This city's sad plight seems to boil down to one thing. Our civic leaders seem to think we're all a bunch of adrenaline junkies. Most of the crazy schemes they've concocted to "save the city" are based on their assumption that the citizenry needs ever increasing jolts of stimulation to keep us going.

Power of Home

Baltimore's untapped strategy:
The power of HOME

Two homes hanging on, next to two boarded-up wrecks. This might be a result of bad planning, but the residents can cope anyway, invoking the "power of home". 

Many people won't touch Baltimore with a ten mile pole. Many others cling to their personal comfort zone, wherever in the city that might be. Meanwhile, our city leaders seem to be intent to constantly pour more and more money into a few key high-visibility institutions like the Convention Center, Inner Harbor and Howard Street retail district until they finally get them right, which they insist are "critical" to saving Baltimore, while claiming their diversion of attention from elsewhere is only temporary.