I just noticed this outstanding story in the Baltimore Sun offering a retrospective on Harborplace’s first 25 years. The reporters seem far more charitable than I might have been. But it is certainly even, and I think it points to some important realities about “revitalization.”
Harborplace is widely lauded as one of the most successful redevelopment efforts in urban history. It had a lot going for it. The stuff it replaced really was blighted. Second, it is near some other very large metropolitan areas like Philly and DC, making it an easy day trip for tourists. The waterfront made it naturally conducive to restaurants and shops. There was very real political drive to get it done, and as the prototype for many similar projects that would follow, it got a lot of free and positive media. There are other selling points, but for now those will suffice.
Given this embarrassment of redevelopment riches, Harborplace as a redevelopment project must have proven an unmitigated success, right? Wrong. While the Sun’s story is largely positive, it points out some problems:
Yet while the blocks within shouting distance of the water thrived, Harborplace's magic touch never reached the vast majority of Baltimore's ailing neighborhoods. Its rush of tourists rarely ventured past its heavily trafficked promenades. "None of it solves a lot of the city's base problems. It doesn't fix schools, or solve crime or clean up the alleys," Millspaugh says. "But it does very well for this corner."
That is something of an understatement. There are places within a stone’s throw of Harborplace that are still extremely ragged. The project simply did not fix the neighborhoods it was supposed to fix. That’s why the city has been involved in a series of similarly well-intentioned—and ultimately unsuccessful—redevelopment efforts ever since.
So yes. Redevelopment officials can build a restaurant that people like. Which of course benefits the people involved in that restaurant and the people who eat there. But even in the very best of circumstances, these projects fail to deliver on their central promise: Large-scale redevelopment “synergies.” More from the Sun:
But charm doesn't make money. National chains such as the Cheesecake Factory, California Pizza Kitchen and Hooters do.
While tourists didn't seem to mind, harder-to-please locals stayed away.
So we take away property from local owners and turn it over to developers so people from out of town can get pizza they like?
But, optimists say, Harborplace gave the city courage to hope.
To Gary Oster, a Baltimore-area native and Renaissance Harborplace Hotel general manager until 1996, the pavilions seemed to be whispering their hometown a message: "We can do it."
That’s the problem. No one doubts that Harborplace is prettier than what it replaced (although anyone who has been there in a while will certainly notice that the facility, which was designed in the late 70s and opened in 1980, is beginning to look like—it was designed in the late 70s opened in 1980.)
But given that it had so much going for it, and seeing that it is now operating right next to an expensive convention center, Camden Yards, Ravens Stadium, the National Aquarium, and seeing that it cost as much as it did, shouldn’t we expect such a facility to do a bit more than “whisper a message”?
Unless, of course, that message is, “Stop confiscating private property and spending gobs of public revenue on big projects that promise redevelopment but instead deliver really profitable Hooters franchises.”
The other message: If that is all Harborplace accomplished despite all it had going for it, we might want to be cautious when planning similarly ambitious projects elsewhere. Like Pittsburgh.
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