Why Baltimore’s preservation commission rejected a developer’s plan for The Compass, and what it could mean for downtown’s West Side

When a group called Westside Partners was selected over five other bidders in 2020 to redevelop 18 city-owned properties near Howard and Lexington streets – an assemblage once known as the Superblock — the team was hailed for its preservation-oriented approach to revitalizing a key stretch of the city’s traditional shopping district.

But nearly three years later, with construction not yet started and development deadlines missed, some local preservationists are questioning whether the team selected by former Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young has the right strategy after all, or whether its plan will erode the very district city planners want to strengthen.

The issue came up last month during a public hearing scheduled by the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP). Part of the city’s Planning Department, CHAP is charged with reviewing plans that would alter the exteriors of buildings in the city’s Five & Dime Historic District, where Westside Partners proposes to build a $150 million-plus mixed-use development called The Compass. It will hold another hearing on the plan on Tuesday.

Before the city will sell the 18 properties it put out for bid, including the former Read’s Drug Store and other retail structures, developers are required to come up with a design and development plan that’s acceptable to the city. And because the property is within a local historic district, the plans must be acceptable not only to the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC), which sought the proposals and is working to rejuvenate the west side of downtown, but also to the city’s preservation commission, stewards of the city’s architectural legacy.

Mix of old and new

The Compass is planned for an area bounded roughly by Lexington, Howard and Fayette streets and Park Avenue – the heart of Baltimore’s traditional retail district. Marion Street divides the parcel into a north half and a south half. City officials have attempted for more than 20 years, working with various groups, to get both sides redeveloped.

The proposal selected by Young called for apartments, offices, a hotel, parking, street-level shops and other uses in a mix of restored and newly-constructed buildings. The sale price is $4,500,001. The development team includes Christopher Janian of Vitruvius Company; Jayson Williams of Mayson-Dixon Companies and Partnered of Pittsburgh.   

The public meeting on July 11, and an earlier meeting on May 9, were the first times that Westside Partners had presented any of their plans for The Compass to the preservation commission in a public session.

Westside Partners did not show a master plan for its entire project. CHAP scheduled the meetings because the team had applied to tear down seven buildings at the northeast corner of Howard and Fayette Streets, which is on the southern half of the parcel that BDC offered for redevelopment, to make way for a new apartment building it proposes to construct as one phase of its project. CHAP’s meetings with Westside Partners so far have been focused on those seven properties.

The seven buildings that Westside Partners wants to demolish are at 101, 105 and 107 N. Howard St. and 220, 222, 224 and 226 W. Fayette St. All are vacant. At the May meeting, the panel determined that five of those seven buildings — 105 and 107 N. Howard St. and 220, 222 and 224 W. Fayette St. – were “contributing structures” within the historic district.

According to CHAP staff preservationist Stacy Montgomery, the contributing structures were built in the mid to late 19^th century and represent “some of the oldest remaining buildings” in the Five & Dime Historic District.

“The three-and-a-half and four-story brick buildings are prime examples of the Federal and Italianate style rowhouses that were altered to accommodate commercial uses on the first and second stories” and still retain much of their original decorative detailing on the exterior, Montgomery told the commission in July.

“These structures are highly visible on two major thoroughfares in Baltimore City,” Montgomery noted. However, because of their deteriorated condition, an engineer’s report provided by the applicant has determined that reinforcing and rehabbing them would be “challenging to design, costly to implement and dangerous to achieve,” she said. 

CHAP panelists said in May that they did not consider 101 N. Howard St. and 226 W. Fayette St. to be contributing structures. That means they will not block plans to demolish them but will review plans for any replacement structures.

Other properties in the city-owned parcel awarded to Westside Partners include: 201-213, 215, 223, 227 and 231 W. Lexington St.; 117, 119 and 121 N. Howard St.; 206-218 W. Fayette St.; 221 Marion St.; portions of 106-112 Park Ave.; and three public alleys. They have not been the subject of CHAP’s recent meetings with Westside Partners.

Two-step process

Under the two-step demolition review process that CHAP follows, when the commission determines in an initial meeting that the buildings an applicant wants to demolish are contributing structures in a local historic district, it requires the applicants to participate in a second public hearing if they still want to move ahead with demolition. 

The second hearing is held to give developers a chance to talk about their construction plans and explain why they believe they would suffer an economic hardship if they aren’t permitted to demolish the buildings they want to tear down. The second hearing also gives members of the general public a chance to tell the commission what they think about the project in question, before the panel makes a decision.

That was the purpose of CHAP’s July 11 meeting with the Compass team, which at that point was seeking permission to demolish the five contributing structures at 105 and 107 N. Howard St. and 220, 222 and 224 W. Fayette St.

In another case this year, CHAP showed willingness to allow a “contributing structure” to be torn down, when it declined to block demolition of the historic Hendler Creamery in the Jonestown Historic District to make way for a community “green space.” The vote was 8 to 1 in favor of demolition, and CHAP drew criticism afterwards from area preservationists for its decision.

The panel did not come to a similar conclusion regarding Westside Partners’ application. After two hours of testimony and discussion, the commissioners voted 7 to 1, with three abstentions, to reject Westside Partners’ request to tear down the five contributing buildings. That meant that of the seven structures that Westside Partners initially sought to demolish, the applicants had permission to tear down only 101 N. Howard St. and 226 W. Fayette St., and that did not give them the larger footprint they wanted to construct a new building.

Paying homage to Trailways

In taking their vote, the commissioners said they are eager to see the west side of downtown revitalized. But the panelists who voted against the demolition request said they weren’t persuaded by Westside Partners’ arguments for demolition. Panelists also expressed concerns about the design approach the developers and their architects were taking with regard to the replacement structure.

In a presentation about the preliminary design of the replacement building, architect Davin Hong of Hanbury showed the panel an image of the northeast corner of Howard and Fayette streets, with what appeared to be a large white building where the seven smaller buildings now stand.

Hong, a Rice- and Harvard-educated design principal with Hanbury, the project’s architect-of-record, told the commission that the replacement structure wasn’t yet designed in detail and that the ‘white box’ image was intended to represent its possible height and volume. “This is massing only, but we would respect the scale and the articulation of the surroundings and respond to them,” he said.

For the final design of the replacement building, Hong said, the architects will be drawing inspiration from a building that previously stood on the block: the 1961 Trailways bus station at 210 W. Fayette St., torn down in 2012 and never replaced. The grassy site where the bus station stood is part the assemblage of properties awarded to Westside Partners.

By combining the footprint of the seven existing buildings with the land where the bus station stood, Hong said, the developers would have land to create one large replacement structure to anchor the south end of the Compass development.

“The source of inspiration would be the Trailways bus station that was previously in the site next door, and having this new building really pay homage to that,” Hong told the commission. 

‘An advent of change’

The commissioners asked if it would be possible for the architects to save the smaller buildings on the site, or at least parts of them such as the front façades. Hong acknowledged that it would be technically feasible, but he said his team decided to go in a different direction.

“The vision for the project is for a new replacement that is more an advent of change, and the use of portions of the building would really limit the definition of that and provide really a fragmented building, sort of a piecemeal, and really limit its architectural character,” he said.

Hong’s presentation led to a wide-ranging discussion among the commissioners about the Compass project and whether the developer’s approach was appropriate for the Five and Dime Historic District.

After seeing the white building and hearing from Hong that a mostly-unmourned Modernist bus depot would be the design inspiration for the replacement building, commissioners questioned whether Westside Partners was building the preservation-oriented project that city officials touted when the team was selected in 2020.

In their deliberations over granting demolition, they questioned the credibility of the developer, which has lost key team members and missed a series of performance deadlines set out by the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) as part of a Land Disposition Agreement with Westside Partners.

Landmark Partners, a development company headed by Jon Pannoni and George Watkins, left the project more than a year ago, and Gensler, previously named as the lead architect, is no longer working on the project. SM+P Architects of Baltimore, a preservation-oriented design firm, is still on the design team headed by Hanbury.

The commission also asked at the July meeting whether the project has financing to move ahead. One panel member voiced concerns that the city could be left with another rubble-strewn lot or half-razed building carcass if the city granted a demolition permit and construction didn’t follow, as shown with the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre and Hendler Creamery demolitions.

In rejecting the demolition application, the commissioners invited the developers to return with more information to support their request, or to come back with a revised design for them to consider. But given the missteps CHAP has made in the past, the importance of contributing structures in a historic district, and the information they had about the Compass, the commissioners said, they weren’t prepared to vote for demolition.

A return meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 8.

Monolithic structure

Why did the panel reject the plans shown in July?

Commissioner Katherine Good, an architect, said the preliminary design that Hong presented is not in keeping with the character of the historic district CHAP is charged with protecting.

“My concern is that one indication that we have [of what] might be coming in the future instead of these buildings is an extremely dense, very large monolithic kind of structure that is not indicative of the historic district in the surroundings, and to me that is a very big concern,” she said. “I would argue…that a historic feel would go a lot farther than a monolithic building.”

Commissioner Peter Morrill said he didn’t think the developers showed enough options, because they talked about either saving all of the buildings on the site or replacing all of them, but nothing in between. He said he’d like to see a design approach that preserved some of the existing buildings, or at least elements of the buildings.

“I would love to see this project move forward. That being said, I think this developer has not sufficiently explained to us why we have to do this all-or-nothing approach,” Morrill said.

“We have estimates for razing them or we have estimates for rehabbing them exactly as they are, and I think some combination is needed,” he continued. “Maybe save some buildings where floor plates align. Maybe keep the entire building freestanding. I’d like to have a suggestion of looking at some infill to have that granular, small-scale development that really does define the district. I would very much like to see a proposal that takes some middle ground into consideration rather than the all-or-nothing approach that has been presented here.”

Granularity

The smaller scale of the existing buildings is what separates the Howard Street corridor from other areas of the city and shouldn’t be considered a drawback, said commissioner Ann Powell, also an architect.

“The granularity that defines this district is not a bad thing,” she said. “Is it supportive of Big Box retail? No. They can stay in Harbor East and they can hang out on Pratt Street. They just got a new tenant down there. That is not what this is about.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has done extensive research about the contributions that smaller-scaled buildings can make in urban environments, she noted.

“They call it Older, Smaller, Better,” she said. “These are properties that are really critical to our economic ecosystem. They’re for new small businesses, women- and minority-owned businesses, to start up and thrive. They have research to support that, so I don’t know why we should default to this kind of Big Box mentality.”

Powell also warned about the possibility of CHAP approving demolition and then construction not following.

“Approving the demolition of this area as a tradeoff for this ‘great thing’ promised in the master plan is a very dangerous game, and that has gotten us in a lot of trouble” in the past, she said, citing the “empty hole” where the Mechanic Theater was demolished nearly a decade ago for a mixed-use project that never materialized.  

Historic character

Private citizens also testified at the hearing that they thought allowing demolition of the five buildings would be inconsistent with CHAP’s role as a preservation commission.

Nicole King, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, agreed with Powell that tearing down the existing buildings would take away a key characteristic that sets the west side of downtown apart from other areas of the city. She pointed to preservation projects such as the Chesapeake Commons apartments at 601 N. Eutaw St. and the current effort to save the Mayfair Theatre’s front façade as part of an apartment development at Howard and Franklin streets.

“The west side of downtown distinguishes itself and its development potential from newer development projects such as Port Covington, or Baltimore Peninsula now, and Harbor East through its historic architecture and character, especially along the Howard Street corridor,” King said. “This historic character is what makes this part of the city still worth redeveloping in the right way, by preserving what is so distinct about the city for future generations.”

King said she was enthusiastic about the Compass project at first because of the promise that it would be preservation-oriented, and the developer’s strategy of building it in phases, but now she isn’t sure.

“Having researched and written extensively about the previous debacles of the past Superblock development project, originally I was excited for the Compass project when it was presented a few years ago,” she said. “I went to the presentation in 2021. I liked that it was in stages…However, the developers have missed numerous deadlines. And after the testimony from the development team today, I still do not feel the physical constraints here are an essential hardship or should prevent the preservation of these important buildings.”

The developers should have known what they were in for when they applied to redevelop properties in a historic district, she said.

“It costs money to preserve buildings, and the developers came in and got a [land disposition agreement] and sought to develop these buildings in a historic district that you designated, and that should actually mean something – to CHAP, to the citizens who care about preservation and the history and the environment on the west side of downtown,” she said. “Considering that the CHAP commissioners…voted unanimously in May that these buildings do contribute to the historic and cultural fabric of the historic district, we should preserve as much of that character in this part of the project as we can.”

‘Be strong’

Johns Hopkins, executive director of Baltimore Heritage, said he believes CHAP should set “a high bar” when it comes to demolishing historic properties and proving economic infeasibility. He reminded the commissioners about a situation more than a decade ago when developers told the panel they couldn’t save historic houses across from the Carroll Mansion in Jonestown, but CHAP “stood firm” and didn’t approve their demolition request.

Hopkins said that team sold its property to another group after its demolition request was turned down, and the once-threatened houses were preserved as part of the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott at 101 S. President St. “I share that to encourage you to be strong,” he told the commissioners.

Hopkins added that he and his board share Janian’s vision for the Compass project “as a whole, the bigger revitalization of what’s called the Superblock.” But “I will admit, I continue to not be able to get my head around the way this parcel [at Howard and Fayette streets] fits into the larger project that includes Lexington Street, Read’s Drug Store, Howard Street,” he said. “What we are fearful of is that an approval and a demolition today of all of the buildings that are incorporated in this part of the project in no way guarantees that the rest of the project happens.”

Hopkins said his board thinks “very highly of the development team. We share their vision. We share their passion.” At the same time, he said, “we know that sometimes even the best intentions and the best capacities go awry, and we are very unclear what happens if this part of this project moves forward and we get a demolition on Howard and Fayette and then the world shifts and what we have, we don’t know.”

The developer’s rationale

Janian, representing Westside Partners at the meeting, told the panel it would not be economically feasible to preserve and rehab the buildings at the northeast corner of Howard and Fayette streets because they have small footprints; their floors don’t line up; their structural condition is poor, and they would be “incredibly costly” to bring up to code.  

He said his cost estimates showed that there would be a $13.8 million gap between what it would cost to rehab the buildings for new uses and what they would be worth, before any tax credits for historic preservation. He said they only have room to hold about two dozen apartments and five street-level retail spaces. “The buildings would only be worth 24 and a half percent of the cost to build,” he said.

Even if the team received the maximum allocation of all tax credits for which it may be eligible, “the project would still cost over $8.2 million more than the value” after it’s completed. Saving parts of the buildings also would not make the budget work, he said.

“Not only are there no efficient, viable uses for the buildings as they stand, there’s no possible way to make the budget work even with the maximum competitive tax credits and grants available,” he said. “There’s no way to save the buildings in full or even partially.” 

By contrast, he said, tearing down the seven buildings at Howard and Fayette streets would give the team land to construct an efficient, code-compliant, economically-viable replacement building that could meet the needs of today’s tenants.

“We humbly ask the commission to approve our plan to demo the buildings and allow us to move the development process forward,” he said. “After almost 20 years of failed attempts, we’re asking you today to help us bring this important project closer to completion.”

‘Centered around people’

Janian argued that demolition of the five “contributing” buildings and two non-contributing buildings “will not negatively affect the overall historic fabric of the neighborhood.”

He told the panel his team intends to preserve a higher percentage of existing buildings on the north side of the development parcel, along West Lexington Street. Of all the buildings Westside Partners is acquiring from the city, he said, his team intends to repurpose approximately 90 percent of the historic façades, based on square footage, and is “only asking for approximately 10 percent to be replaced.”

The development “will retain all the historic fabric of the north block that fronts Howard, Lexington and Park,” while supplementing older buildings of different vintages with “new, efficient buildings aimed at attracting more people and businesses downtown,” he told the panel. 

As for the replacement building on the Fayette Street side, “we’ll be drawing inspiration for the new building from the historic architecture that previously sat on the block, and we believe this project will be discussed decades from now as part of the reason why this neighborhood and greater downtown was able to be reimagined from a largely commercial district that was dead after 5 p.m. to a vibrant, mixed-use area bustling with people. Focusing on people is the important idea here. Our project is centered around people.”

‘A square peg’

Janian said the development team values the area’s history but also has to make choices.

“We understand and appreciate the history,” he said, “but at some point we have to choose whether these specific buildings in question today have outlived their useful lives or, at the expense of progress, are we going to try to force a square peg into a round hole?”

The majority of the buildings in the neighborhood that are viable to preserve and rehabilitate should be, he said. But “the ones that are in complete disrepair and are too costly to repurpose, have small, inefficient floorplates, lack the marketability [to attract] future tenants, should be replaced by thoughtfully-designed new buildings and uses that improve the neighborhood and the greater city. The beauty of the neighborhood comes from the vastly different styles and sizes of buildings that were built and rebuilt over time. We’re at a critical moment in Baltimore’s history where we have the opportunity to create a more positive narrative and come together as a city to make really good things happen.”

Since his team is retaining the majority of the historic fabric in the northern half, Janian reasoned, “the demo of these five dilapidated buildings will have no significant impact on the historically- or architecturally-significant elements of the overall district. In fact, when walking around the Five & Dime district and the Howard Street corridor, there are façades similar in age and architecture to these specific buildings on nearly every block.”  

Design limitations

Hong, the architect, told the commission that the existing buildings are not suitable for what his clients want to build there.

“The vision for the project is to consolidate the lots to accommodate a larger tenant that would be able to have a larger footprint with larger floorplates that are open,” he said. “We imagine that having separate lots with separate party walls would not be conducive to that.”

Even a plan that preserves the façades, with new construction behind, would limit the development potential of the site, Hong said.

“If you were to remove the walls and just preserve the façades, the windows do not align with the floors,” he said. “If you were to put in new floors behind the façades, you would have conditions that are very awkward with relation to the windows and the floors. In order to mitigate that, you would have to step the floor, and that creates difficult ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] issues within the building. So the project would be severely hampered in terms of what the possibilities are for redevelopment of this site.” 

In addition, each of the existing buildings has a separate entrance, and that affects who can occupy space at street level, he said.

“The retail spaces having five separate retail entrances really limits the ability for a large retail tenant to take up the site, or even having two or three tenants,” Hong said. “If you just think about what they were built for, these are small storefronts built for very small shops of that era and that is not…what this strip would really need for it to be economically vibrant.”

On the northern part of the development, “there are façades that will be retained with different uses behind them,” Hong said. “But in this case, with the smaller footprints and smaller façades, it’s really difficult” to make that approach work. 

Will the project die?

Asked whether the team has financing to build its project, Janian told the commission that his team has relationships with funders and has begun talking to them. But first, he said, it needs to get approval for its development approach, including what it can demolish, and that will guide the more detailed design work from which the team can get cost estimates and pin down financing.

“In any kind of development process,” he said, “the entire amount of funding doesn’t get closed on until you’re ready to put a shovel in the ground — which doesn’t mean that we don’t have discussions…that doesn’t mean that we don’t have people who are interested…We have a bunch of people that we’ve been talking to. If we needed a letter for a commitment, I’m sure we could get it.”

Before the panel took a vote, three commissioners asked Janian what would happen to the Compass if they rejected his team’s request to tear down the buildings at Howard and Fayette streets.

“What happens to the project?” asked commissioner Kuo Pao Lian “The complete project does not move forward, or just that parcel?”

Janian did not give a clear answer.

“There is no other real option to make these work,” he said.

“So the greater project dies and it goes back to BDC?” Lian asked.

“After 20 years of it not working, it would be really sad,” Janian said.

But “is that what happens, if one parcel doesn’t go forward the entire project doesn’t go forward?” Lian asked.

“This is a very important parcel for making sure that we’re able to master-plan going forward,” Janian said. “This is holding up the entire project.”

“When you say this is a very important parcel…” prodded commissioner Tamara Woods.

“They all are,” Janian said. “We have the north block and the south block. But with the amount of effort and time and money that we’re putting into the project, we can’t have five vacant buildings sitting right next to” fully redeveloped properties.

So, “if this doesn’t go in your favor, does the project die?” asked board chair Harry Spikes.

“I don’t really know. I can’t answer that directly,” Janian said. “These buildings don’t work. Then it’s a chain reaction to what we’re planning on the flat, grassy lot (where the bus station was.] We’re not planning for it to die.”.    

After the vote in July, Janian said, “I disagree strongly with the way they voted.” He said he will return to CHAP with more information to support his contention that it’s not economically feasible to preserve the five contributing structures. “We will show how that doesn’t work,” he said.

Master plan

For the next meeting, several commissioners said they would like to hear more about the plan for the entire Compass project and how the phase involving the corner of Howard and Fayette streets fits in.

Others said they’d like to see a plan for the corner of Howard and Fayette streets that saves at least some of the existing buildings, such as the two that front on Howard Street and appear to have floor levels that line up 

“The master plan would be helpful for us” to see, said commissioner Gary Rodwell. 

“If they don’t think they can make it work with parts of these buildings or all of these buildings — and maybe it doesn’t work — I think they need to show us why it doesn’t work if they want to take it down,” Morrill said. 

Commissioner Garrett Power, like Morrill, said he’d like to see more options. A retired law professor at the University of Maryland, Power ultimately abstained at the July meeting, saying he didn’t have enough information to make a decision.  

“I’m a pragmatist,” he said. “I am willing to sacrifice these buildings if they are the only way to accomplish the larger goal of the redevelopment of the block,” he said last month. “I am not sure that’s the case. I would like to not decide this today. I would like to urge the important players to go through one more effort at alternative dispute resolution and see if either they can convince the commission that their way is the only way or come up with an alternative that takes some kind of a compromise. Maybe there is no compromise. But sitting here with the knowledge I have, I’m unsure that the only way to permit this block to go forward on a large scale is the sacrifice of these buildings, so I will abstain.” 

Middle ground approach 

There was some disagreement among the panel members about holding out for a “middle-ground approach.

While Morrill said he’d like to see a design that combined new construction and preservation, Commissioner Kuo Pao Lian said he was dubious that such an approach would be successful architecturally.

Dis-assembling buildings is “a path that I don’t think is something that should be commonplace,” Lian said. “Obviously that leads to issues that we’ve seen in certain other project reviews. It’s also led to I think unsuccessful projects that do not necessarily retain the historical qualities by ripping off everything else except for the façade.”

Lian said he can see only two viable options:

“Either, yes, demo everything and build a brand new project or deal with each separate lot and build either a new-construction building or renovate the existing building with additions if you want to, but each individually,” he said. “That’s really the only two plays. If you dissect these buildings and build a brand new buildng with all these pieces and parts kind of attached to this new building, that’s not the project that I think is making anything better. It’s not economically viable and it will make the project worse, a lot worse.”

The RFP process

Lian, an architect, asked if the Request for Proposals (RFP) process was sufficiently clear about what buildings the selected developer would be required to save.

“At the beginning of the RFP process, in establishing a criteria for developers, it should have been established that, hey, these buildings are contributing at that time and that part of that RFP is that the response then needs to deal with that,” he said. “Because that doesn’t happen, it opens it up for the developer to be able to go: I’m going to knock these down…Because the criteria is not established, they do have that right and that ability to go, I’m going to develop this the way I see fit.” 

Lian said architects are capable of preparing plans for restoring all the existing buildings on the site, replacing all the existing buildings, or doing something in between. “As the architect, there’s a technical ability to be able to develop that site in different ways.”  

Lian also said he doesn’t understand why CHAP is being asked to look at plans for a “big building,” when the Five & Dime historic district is made up of and defined by its small-scaled structures.

“I don’t know why we’re looking at this project as a big building, ever,” he said. “This was never a big-building site. There’s multiple buildings. I think it should stay that way. There’s a development there that can happen with multiple buildings, even if it’s not the preference of the pro forma of the developer. At the same time, I don’t want this site to sit here forever, for another 20 years as a vacant site.” 

‘Specific location versus greater good’ 

Commissioner Nichole Battle, CEO of the Govans Ecumenical Development Corporation, said she wonders if there has been sufficient coordination between CHAP and BDC, given that the properties are in a historic district.

“Have we also been in conversation with BDC about options that don’t involve the complete demolition of these properties?” she asked. “It’s my concern that when we’re looking at development in Baltimore City, our agencies aren’t talking to each other, and this is just another example. There are different priorities.”

Battle said she would like to know that different city agencies have the same priorities and are working toward the same goals.

“I think that’s something that I would like, as a commissioner, to start occurring, so that people can be aware of what each of our roles are in this process and so that we can at least have more information and also be on the same page about what we’re preserving and what we’re not and what our ultimate goal is.” 

Woods, a deputy commissioner in the city’s housing department, said that for her, deciding how to vote comes down to one issue: To back a project that’s more consistent with the historic district but may not be economically feasible and may never get built, or to clear the site and build a project that may chip away at the historic district but is economically viable and could help draw people to the area. She called it: “a question of specific location versus greater good for the city.”

Commissioner Powell said the panel members need to remember that their role is to protect the character of the historic district, and the structures that make it different from other parts of the city.

“We have these historic resources that were left behind… and this is a legacy but also the gift and promise that we have in Baltimore,” she said. “I just think we really have a special thing here and our responsibility is to be the stewards of this legacy.”

The hearing is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 8 on the eighth floor of the Benton Building, 417 E. Fayette St.