Baltimore’s France-Merrick Performing Arts Center draws more than 300,000 people a year to a wide range of events. Its centerpiece, the historic Hippodrome Theatre, boasts more than 12,000 subscribers for its annual series of traveling Broadway productions and even serves as the launching pad for some of them.
All that use has taken a toll on the four-building, state-owned facility at 12 N. Eutaw St., which hasn’t had a comprehensive renovation since it reopened in 2004 as Baltimore’s home for traveling Broadway shows. But that may soon change.
On Tuesday, the Maryland Stadium Authority approved a request to hire a prominent New York architect, Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, to administer a “comprehensive facility analysis” of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center over the next six months. The survey was requested by the non-profit Hippodrome Foundation Inc., which owns the center with the state. The analysis will include a property condition assessment and property condition report that will be presented to state officials and the Hippodrome Foundation board.
The goal of the assessment, managers say, is to provide information that can be used to develop a master plan to guide improvements that will enable the France-Merrick facility to continue serving as a performing center and community hub for the next 30 years or more.
Beyer Blinder Belle won’t be doing any design work and won’t necessarily be the architect for any future improvements to the France-Merrick center. That would come in a later phase, depending on what the property condition report recommends. But this work is the beginning of a process that could lead to a major overhaul of the performing arts center, which is an anchor for revitalization efforts on the west side of downtown Baltimore.
Five-year project
According to Ron Legler, President of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, renovations could take place over the next five years and be completed in phases, if funds are available. He said the cost of upgrades won’t be known until the assessment is complete but it could be several hundred million dollars, depending on what the report identifies. Once complete, he said, Beyer Blinder Belle’s analysis can be used to hire a design team to develop a master plan to guide improvements, and the master plan can then be used to raise funds to complete the work.
This will be the first comprehensive assessment of the center’s condition since it reopened in 2004 after a $78 million renovation designed to make it a home for touring Broadway productions and other events.
Legler, who has headed the France-Merrick center since 2014, listed several reasons why the foundation asked for a facility analysis. As the performing center has aged, he said, problems with its infrastructure have ranged from burst pipes to power outages to rusting equipment to 2000s-era improvements simply wearing out.
“Basically, they’re going to do about six months’ worth of investigating in the building,” he said when asked about the scope of the project. “The Hippodrome opened in 2004, but a lot of the mechanical pieces were put in before the opening. It started in the early 2000s, so some of the equipment is 26 to 30 years old already, so it’s coming to the end of its natural life span. The last time that happened the Hippodrome went defunct, because it couldn’t keep up with all the repairs and maintenance that were needed.”
Temperatures in the building have sometimes been difficult to control, he said.
“We’ve lost power multiple times,” he said. “The chilled water that they have running into the building, that equipment is all rusted through so it’s not letting the temperature get to the right temperature because the pipes are all rusting. All that equipment is at the end of its life. All the HVAC systems, the brains die and then we don’t have air conditioning. Some of these shows are very demanding. “Hamilton” needs to be 67 degrees on stage, and for a 100-year-old building with old air conditioning units, it’s really tough. We have to bring portable units in, and there are constant work-arounds for the equipment that we have right now.”
Value engineering
Some shortcomings have been the result of “value engineering” in which contractors eliminated certain items from the original renovation program to save money during construction. For example, Legler said, the designers originally wanted the facility to have a separate chilled water plant on site, but that was eliminated and the building is connected to the more costly Vicinity [formerly Veolia] network that serves other buildings downtown. If the France-Merrick center had its own chilled water plant, he said, its operating costs would be significantly lower.
“We have 14 different roofing structures. We have nine different HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems,” he said. “A lot of the original work that was supposed to be done got value engineered out of the project because they didn’t have enough money to do it properly. We were supposed to have a chilled water plant on property. Now we have a very expensive [Vicinity] contract that [costs] five times more than most of the performing arts centers in the United States. It’s very stressful for us to operate this building because it’s so expensive.”
Legler said many of the needed improvements involve the building’s mechanical and electrical systems and technological features as opposed to what people see from the street. He said the exteriors of the four buildings are in good condition because they have been well maintained. He said the fly space and fly system above the main stage also don’t need major changes.
“Basically, the architects are going to go through every aspect of electrical, plumbing, roofing – all the things that were value engineered out of the original plan and [look at] what the Hippodrome will be for the next 30 years,” he said. “It’s really critical right now. We’ve had so much success…But the building is just demanding way more money than we could ever supply to repair everything. So what we’re hoping to do is get a blueprint of what is needed…We want to get as much information as we can in a six-month period to be able to deliver a full list of everything that the Hippodrome’s going to need to be there for the state in the next 30 years.”
As part of their work, he said, the architects will be on site to see how the center functions before, during and after performances and other events.
They “will be studying the building from the top to the bottom,” he said. “They’re going to be coming to load-ins. They’re going to coming to shows. They’re going to be coming to educational events. They’re going to see how we use the building and where the pinch points are and all of the things that are making the building so expensive to operate.”
Patron amenities
Besides assessing the center’s aging mechanical systems, Legler said, the architects also will be asked to look at what patrons notice when they come inside the Hippodrome to see a production – the layout of the bars and restrooms, the carpet, the amount of lobby space and stairways, the way seating is provided for people in wheelchairs.
He said the 2,248-person seating capacity in the Hippodrome is unlikely to change substantially as a result of the analysis, but more seats could be added if the current arrangement of ramps related to seats for disabled patrons is reconfigured.
“We want to look at every single thing that is part of the experience of coming to the Hippodrome,” he said. “We want to look at the entrances. We want to look at technology…So much of the lobbies are eaten up by gigantic staircases. There’s not a lot of places to do events.”
Although the Hippodrome has been serving as the starting point for three national tours a year thanks to a state tax credit, he said, touring companies have suggested they might stay in town even longer if the center had additional spaces and features they need.
“The shows are saying, listen, if you guys had the rehearsal space, we could bring the show here earlier,” he said. “Right now, they stay in New York and they spend money in New York to rehearse. They could be doing those three weeks of rehearsals in Baltimore, which brings more hotel rooms, more everything.”
He also wants to explore opportunities to expand within the confines of the center’s existing shell.
At present, he said, “we have no education space. We have very little gathering space. The elevators are old.” One night, “the elevator stopped and people were trapped in it for 45 minutes and they missed the whole first act of a show.”
Legler said the foundation directors realized some of the shortcomings of the 112-yeaar-old Hippodrome theater when the foundation spent $21 million to renovate the former Eutaw Savings Bank several years ago to create a multi-purpose events venue called the M&T Bank Exchange.
“When we did the Exchange, we saw how much everything needed to be done so badly. It really made us nervous,” he said. “Now the Exchange is the most beautiful part of the building and the most efficient part of the building, and we’ve got to get the rest of the building up to speed.”
Phasing strategy
Legler said the foundation also wants the architects to break down the center’s needs in terms of priority – starting with what’s needed most as opposed to what would simply be nice to have if the money were there – and suggest how renovations could be phased so the center doesn’t have to close for repairs. Unlike Baltimore’s football and baseball stadiums where major improvements can be completed during the off-season, Legler said, the theater season may run from September to June, leaving little down time for renovation work.
Legler said it’s possible that the architects may recommend that the France-Merrick center be replaced with a new facility for touring Broadway productions. But he said the cost to build a new performing arts center in the United States could be $900 million to $1 billion or more, and he believes the France-Merrick center can be upgraded for about one third of that figure.
Despite the issues with value engineering, he said, he believes Baltimore got its money’s worth.
“For what Baltimore got for $78 million, it’s really unheard of,” he said. “The Hippodrome, I would put it up against any other national touring theater in the United States. It’s worth saving. It’s worth investigating. And if we don’t do it, it’s going to end up in the same place where it was 30 years ago, which is decrepit.”
Seven proposals
The stadium authority, acting on behalf of the State of Maryland, requested proposals from architects and engineers on Sept. 19, 2025, and set a deadline of Oct. 31. According to Yai Waite, associate vice president for procurement, the stadium authority received seven offers. A selection committee, including Hippodrome Foundation President Olive Waxter, invited five groups to make oral presentations and then three to make financial proposals.
During its monthly meeting on Tuesday, the stadium authority approved a $479,762.60 architectural and engineering services contract with Beyer Blinder Belle. Waite said Beyer Blinder Belle received the highest overall score from the selection panel, offered the lowest fee and was the selection committee’s unanimous choice to lead the project. Legler said the work will be paid for by a mixture of public and private funds, including $150,000 from the State of Maryland.
The Hippodrome Theatre was designed by Thomas Lamb and opened on Nov. 23, 1914, as a “grand movie palace” and vaudeville house with 3000 seats. Its renovation in the early 2000s was led by several design firms over a multi-year period.
One key consultant was Hugh Hardy, a noted theater architect and founding partner of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (HHPA ). Hardy died in 2017 from complications after a fall on his way to a theater he helped to renovate. HHPA became Pfeiffer Partners Architects, a Perkins Eastman Studio. Pfeiffer is the lead architect for the Milton S. Eisenhower Library renovation underway at the Johns Hopkins University. Other designers involved with the Hippodrome renovation in the early 2000s included Murphy & Dittenhafer and architect Walter Schamu.
Founded in 1968 by John Beyer, Richard Blinder and John Belle, Beyer Blinder Belle is a prominent New York-based design firm with extensive experience in historic preservation, adaptive reuse and theater design. It has won three Presidential Design Awards, the Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York chapter, and the national AIA Firm Award, among others.
Belle Blinder Belle’s theater clients include the Apollo Theater Foundation, the 92nd Street Y arts center and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C.
The firm’s other major clients include the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Frick Collection; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library; Green-Wood Cemetery; Central Park Conservancy, the Met Breuer, the TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport, and the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island Foundation in New York; the Rubell Museum and Planet Word in Washington, D. C.; and Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania.
Before stepping down last year, partner emeritus Fred Bland was the longest-serving member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, attending 640 public meetings over 17 years. In Baltimore, the firm led the three-year, $115 million restoration and technology upgrade of Enoch Pratt Free Library’s 400 Cathedral Street location that was completed in 2019.
Advocates for the arts
Legler said the design team will begin work this month and he expects its report this summer. He said he hopes the team’s analysis will lead to a strategy for obtaining support from the state and others that will help the France-Merrick center remain Broadway’s home in Baltimore and “one of pillars of the cultural community in the state of Maryland.” He said Gov. Wes Moore and First Lady Dawn Moore have been strong supporters of the Hippodrome in the past and he hopes that will continue.
“Gov. Moore and First Lady Dawn Moore are advocates of the arts in Maryland,” he said. “They know the importance of the arts and how they help communities. We’ve been a very bright light on the west side of Baltimore for the last 22 years and we want to continue to be that.”
Just as state officials “future-proofed” Baltimore’s Camden Yards stadiums by providing funds for upgrades, “the Hippodrome now needs to be future-proofed,” he said. “This is really just preparing our building for what it’s going to need for the future and having a blueprint to do that.”
Terrific, in-depth article, as one would expect from a journalist of Mr. Gunts’ quality!
what requires renovation is not the theater, but the theater district. Make the surrounding blocks safe and filled with restaurants and you will have a long waiting list of subscribers.
The most frequent and universal complaint regarding the Hippodrome has to do with seating. The rows are too close together. I am only 5′ 3″ and even I am cramped. It would not be difficult to remove some rows and redistribute the seats. While you lower the capacity of the theater, you will have happier patrons, and most performances do not sellout so it is a moot point.