Baltimore’s Harborplace pavilions will be torn down to make way for a new waterfront development, owner says

Baltimore’s Harborplace pavilions, symbols of the city’s acclaimed waterfront Renaissance in the 1980s and now tarnished reminders of the area’s decline, will be torn down to make way for a new development designed to draw people back to the water’s edge and spark another period of downtown rejuvenation.

That’s the decision made by MCB Real Estate managing partner P. David Bramble following a four-month-long community engagement process led by his company to give members of the general public a chance to say what they’d like to see happen with the once-bustling pavilions, which are now largely vacant after an out-of-town developer ran into financial problems and a court-appointed receiver assumed temporary control.

About 150 people gathered on the second level of the Light Street pavilion on Saturday to take part in the last of three ‘community engagement’ sessions and hear about Bramble’s plans for the 3.2-acre site at Pratt and Light streets, a prime property that an MCB Real Estate affiliate acquired in July.

Bramble has hinted strongly in recent months that he was leaning toward razing the pavilions to create a blank slate for a replacement development, and in July he announced the members of the architecture and planning team that MCB Real Estate hired to design what will be built.

The developer did not specifically talk about demolition during Saturday’s two-hour community meeting or show any drawings for what might rise where the two-story pavilions now stand. After the formal session, asked by a Baltimore Business Journal reporter if the existing buildings will be torn down rather than recycled, Bramble confirmed that he has decided to tear them down. It was the first time he has gone on the record about that decision.

Last of a series

Opened on July 2, 1980, Harborplace was the first in a series of all-new “festival marketplaces” that were designed by Benjamin Thompson & Associates (BTA) for legendary developer James Rouse and the Maryland-based Rouse Company, and today it stands as the last remaining example from that series.

Other Rouse-built marketplaces modeled after the Harborplace pavilions to revitalize their respective cities, including Jacksonville Landing in Jacksonville, Florida; most of Bayside Marketplace in Miami, Florida, and South Street Seaport in New York City, have already been torn down. So has Harbourside, a Harborplace lookalike in Sydney, Australia.

Portions of another Harborplace clone not designed by Thompson, Waterside in Norfolk, Virginia, are still open. The granddaddy of all festival markets, Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, also survives, but the buildings there were historic structures retrofitted in the 1970s by Thompson, not built from scratch as Harborplace was.

Despite their age, architectural significance and connection to Rouse, Thompson, former Mayor William Donald Schaefer and others, Baltimore’s Harborplace pavilions are not protected from demolition by any sort of landmark designation. Although some local preservationists have talked about seeking landmark status for the pavilions, no one has taken the steps to begin that process on the city, state or federal level.

No shopping mall

In remarks during the community meeting on Saturday, Bramble did not say exactly what he plans to build in place of the two pavilions. That’s consistent with past public remarks, in which he has said it won’t be entirely a shopping mall and that it likely will be a mix of uses that could include shops and restaurants, office space, residences and public space, but didn’t go into much more detail than that.

Bramble said on Saturday that he isn’t ready to talk about specific design ideas because he and his team are still gathering and evaluating feedback from three public listening sessions they’ve held, as well as smaller dinners and other meetings with various stakeholders. 

Instead of presenting any design proposals for the Inner Harbor site, he spoke in general terms about his vision for building a development that will help energize and redefine the city.

“We pledged at the outset that we would talk and listen first before we started telling everybody this is what’s going to happen, and we stuck to that,” he said. “Of course, it’s a lot. We’ve got a lot of ideas. Some of them are fabulous and some of them are absolutely crazy, but it’s kind of our job to smoosh them together and come up with something that we can actually execute.”

After three community engagement sessions, “we’ve gotten input,” he said after the meeting. “Now it’s time for us to give people pictures and ideas to react to.”

From exciting to heartbreaking

When Time magazine’s editors put Rouse on its cover in 1981 and hailed him as an urban visionary, Harborplace represented the best of Baltimore and offered a new approach to revitalizing a city by activating its waterfront, Bramble told the audience.

“For a time, it was the most exciting thing in the world,” he said. “Everyone came here. People came from all around the world” and Baltimore was seen as “leading the charge.”

But in its current condition, “it’s really heartbreaking,” Bramble said of Harborplace. “I think we all feel that way…This doesn’t represent the best of what Baltimore can be, by not even a smidgen. It represents decay. It represents corporate interests over local interests.”

At the same time, he said, Harborplace still has great potential because of its setting on the waterfront, at the crossroads of where people live, work and play.

“It represents an amazing opportunity because it’s literally right in the heart of the city,” he said. “And although these buildings have basically become dilapidated and mostly empty except for the cool entrepreneurs we’re bringing in now to bring back life to it, this place is still active. There are people around here on a nice day. People want to have a connection to the water. Now it’s our job to figure out how to turn this sort of dilapidated piece of junk into the new shining star that we can all follow.” 

Bramble vowed to waste no time rebuilding the area once his team arrives at a final vision. At one point, he jolted the audience by announcing that, “construction starts tomorrow” – a nod to the people who want to see something happen as soon as possible. He said his designers and planners have already been hard at work, drawing on information from the planning sessions and other research.

“The next step is to take this round of feedback and try to coalesce around something we can actually build and develop,” he said. “Our goal is to come back to the city of Baltimore with pictures and designs and a strategy for execution and then to move very quickly. We are not a government entity. We are a business entity and so we move fast because we need to make money for our investors. And so you will see us move quickly, I think, with your support. That’s the plan. The next step is to get this input and get rolling.”

80 neighborhoods represented 

Participants at the Saturday meeting included City Council member Eric Costello; former Maryland State Delegate Maggie Mcintosh; Downtown Partnership of Baltimore president Shelonda Stokes; and city planner Renata Southard. Most, however, came from outside the worlds of planning, politics and city government. Many were residents of Federal Hill, Otterbein and other parts of the city who wanted to know about and perhaps influence what takes shape on the waterfront.

The first community engagement meeting was held on June 3 at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. The second session was held Aug. 4 at the Waxter Senior Center in Mount Vernon. In all three cases, participants made reservations to attend on ourharborplace.com, a website created by MCB Real Estate to promote community involvement in the planning process. According to MCB Real Estate, community members from more than 80 neighborhoods across Baltimore have provided input, even before Saturday’s session.

As in previous sessions, participants on Saturday sat at tables of seven or eight and listened to introductory remarks by Bramble and Dionne Joyner-Weems, CEO of the Audacity Group and moderator for the meeting.

After the opening statements, the participants spent much of the meeting talking with each other at their tables about what they’d like to see and not see at a reimagined Harborplace. At the end, representatives from the different tables reported back to the entire group and heard closing remarks from Bramble. 

The third session differed from the first in one key respect: During the third session, although the development team members didn’t show specific proposals for the Harborplace property, they showed photos of other urban developments around the world and asked the attendees to react to them, as the starting point for conversations about what they’d like to see at the Inner Harbor.

The places in the photos ranged from The Wharf in Washington, D. C., to Marina Bay in Singapore to the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. Some weren’t even on waterfronts, such as the Ithaca Commons pedestrian mall in upstate New York, where Fall Creek Gorge, Cascadilla Creek Gorge and Triphammer Falls are the closest water features.

The examples shown to the participants included high rises, mid rises and low rises. Some showed development that was built right up to the water’s edge. Other examples showed cases where buildings were set back from the water by a pedestrian promenade, as Harborplace is, and provided views through to the waterfront.

For the most part, participants said they didn’t like towers or dense blocks that walled off cities from their waterfronts. They also preferred examples where public spaces drew people to the waterfront, rather than privatized zones or commercial districts designed to keep some people out.

A second change is that the discussions on Saturday were monitored by members of the four design studios that MCB Real Estate has hired to design the replacement for Harborplace.

The four companies are Gensler, a large international firm with a Baltimore office on Pratt Street; BCT Design Group; Sultan Campbell Britt & Associates; and Unknown Studio, a landscape architecture and urban design firm. They hadn’t been announced when the community engagement process began in June. On Saturday, representatives from the four studios sat at the various tables and took notes about what participants said they liked or didn’t like about projects in other cities.

Comments from the meeting

Here are a few of the comments that came out of the meeting:

“Shallow up” the roads: Put Pratt and Light streets on a road diet: Observers want to see a reduction in the number of traffic lanes pedestrians must cross in order to reach the Harborplace property.

Rethink McKeldin Plaza: Participants observed that the triangular plaza where the McKeldin Fountain used to be contributes little to the environment leading to Harborplace, despite its prime location. Some suggested that the city-owned plaza be rethought as part of the reimagining effort for Harborplace, perhaps even incorporated into the redevelopment footprint. Bramble said he agrees that it is an underutilized space.

Picking the right mix of uses and activities: Participants said they’d prefer to see compelling uses that aren’t available elsewhere in the city, rather than more of the same. They said they don’t want to see just more offices or residences for the sake of adding another tower. They said they’d like to see uses that take advantage of the waterfront setting. One participant asked for opportunities to fish, to catch crabs and otherwise interact with the water itself.

Will the new Harborplace be a cultural hub like Station North might be getting at the North Avenue Market? Predominantly residential? A place for commerce? For leisure and entertainment? Some participants wanted Bramble to pick a lane, before the design process gets too far along. “A convincing case can be made that the infrastructure/physical form of a new Harborplace is secondary to the uses/programming/human activity” that should take place there, Towers at Harbor Court resident Bill Pencek wrote on Facebook after the session.

Striking the appropriate balance of public and private space: Participants said they’d like to see any new development offer views from surrounding streets clear through to the waterfront and continue to offer free access all along the water’s edge. They said the Inner Harbor amphitheater is a good use of public space but they wish it were larger.

Asked about public space after the meeting, Bramble said he understands that welcoming public spaces are keys to attracting people to whatever private spaces are constructed. “It’s how the public space invites people in to use the private space,” he said. “That’s what we’re really after…We need to design the public space so that it creates value for the private property.”

Bramble said he’d like to create an environment with so much to offer that people come to Harborplace for one reason and end up staying to do even more because “there’s a sense of: while we’re down here, let’s have dinner, have a drink, do something with my kids. That’s the goal.”

African American history

Bramble said one surprise that he had as his team delved into the history of the site is that the land where Harborplace stands was once a slave port.

“Until I got involved with this project, I had no idea that this is one of the major places that slaves were shipped from the deep south,” he said. He also didn’t know that America’s largest freed slave population lived where Harborplace is now. “It’s called Freedom Town,” he said. “I never learned that. I’ve lived in Baltimore my entire life and I never heard that before.”

Bramble said he has also been both surprised and gratified by how many people have taken part in the community engagement process. He said 30,000 people have reached out to his team in some way.

“That’s damn near as many people as vote in a mayoral election,” he said. “I’m excited because I think we are really engaging people. If we can get folks to feel like they were part of this process, [we can] turn it into something that everybody feels belongs to them.”

Demolition decision questioned

After Saturday’s meeting, as word got out about the Bramble’s decision to raze the pavilions, some preservationists said they were disappointed and questioned whether it was the right move.

“The demo notion is unfortunate and wrong headed,” said Pencek, former executive director of World Heritage USA and a former assistant secretary of Tourism, Film and the Arts for Maryland’s Department of Commerce.

“The next iteration of Harborplace needs to be bold, cool, chic, understated, authentic to place, stunning and inspirational – among many other things – to succeed for the next 40+ years. Upcycling is what the structures demand. Demo and new construction and 5 years down time is so 20^th century and the antithesis of what this community – or the world – needs in 2023-2063.”

“Bramble’s preconceived notion that pavilions have to go is unfortunate,” wrote architect and urban planner Klaus Philipsen, president of ArchPlan Inc. and author of a popular blog about urban design issues. “We should have more respect for what was done before us and build on it instead of wiping it away.”

Philipsen, who attended the community engagement session, also wrote to City Planning Director Chris Ryer suggesting that “the City as land owner should insert itself with a partial preservation requirement” short of conferring landmark designation. 

“I believe that one or both of the pavilion structures should remain in some form, although probably with a very different appearance,” he argued. “We should respect all important structures that are part of our urban history. A city progresses best by modification, adaptation and on the shoulders of what happened before, rarely by wiping the slate clean.” 

Philipsen added that “I’d like to keep one or both of those pavilions as an open shell (at least the lower level) that allows views towards the water, eliminates the “back of house” aspects along Pratt and Light and can be used for events that should be frequent at Harborplace (Book Fair, Light festival etc.). The pavilions have sound bones and would stand strong a lot longer.” 

Temporary Harborplace tenants

Even though MCB Real Estate is moving quickly, planners say, it likely will be several years before final plans are approved and ready for construction.

In the meantime, while it’s developing designs for what might replace the Harborplace pavilions, MCB Real Estate is moving ahead with plans to activate the waterfront by filling vacant retail space in the two pavilions on a temporary basis. Earlier this year, the company said it is seeking merchants who would like to lease space on a short-term basis and would be willing to move out when the company is ready to start construction on its long term project. 

Two of the new short term Harborplace merchants selected by MCB, Matriarch Coffee and Crust by Mack, were serving coffee and pastries at the meeting on Saturday. MCB Real Estate is also working with the Downtown Partnership on a special edition of its successful BOOST (Black Owned and Operated Storefront Tenancy) program, to fill other spaces in the pavilions.

One of the next opportunities for public discussion about the redevelopment of Harborplace will be at the Baltimore Together Summit (baltimoretogether.com) that the Baltimore Development Corporation and others are holding on October 30 at the M&T Bank Exchange at 12 N. Eutaw Street. Bramble said MCB Real Estate will continue to take public comments about Harborplace on its website, ourharborplace.com.