When city and state leaders wanted to rejuvenate the Inner Harbor in the 1960s and 1970s, they didn’t start with a hotel or an office building or an apartment complex.
The first major building to open was the Maryland Science Center, a permanent home for the Maryland Academy of Sciences that opened 50 years ago at the intersection of Light Street and Key Highway.
The decision to start with a public attraction rather than a privately-owned building, civic leaders said at a 50th birthday celebration last weekend, set the tone for the Inner Harbor as a collection of tourist-friendly spaces and one-of-a-kind buildings that would give both residents and visitors reasons to come to the city’s revitalized waterfront less than a decade after the riots of the late 1960s.
But the science center that opened on June 13, 1976, was a far different structure from the one that draws 400,000 visitors a year now, after multiple changes to the building were made over the years, and its transformation still isn’t complete
On Saturday, civic leaders marked the science center’s 50th anniversary by breaking ground on the latest capital improvement, a $2 million makeover of its harbor-facing entrance plaza. It’s the latest in a series of changes that started many years ago to “soften” the building and the area around it.
As part the event, leaders talked about how far the science center has come from its early days, how difficult it was to be the first public attraction alone by itself on the Inner Harbor shoreline, and how it has changed over the years.
Anchor institution
While its construction represented a vote of confidence in the Inner Harbor and gave the area a strong anchor institution, the science center faced challenges specifically because it was a pioneer on the waterfront, officials said. There was nothing around it that resembled the package of attractions that draws people today – no convention center, no National Aquarium, no festival marketplace, no Pier 6 concert tent.
Before the science center opened, in the pre-Harborplace days, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was a working waterfront known for its dilapidated wharves, fishmongers and banana boats. No one thought of it as a tourist destination.
“The location was great, but there was nothing else around” for visitors, said James Backstrom, the science center’s first Executive Director. “It was a battle.”
As designed by noted architect Edward Durell Stone, the three-story science center had an austere, windowless, fortress-like appearance — stark and foreboding, seemingly impenetrable. While it looked as if it were designed to withstand another riot, it wasn’t exactly welcoming to families looking for places to take young children on a weekend.
And it could have been even less inviting.
According to senior educator Peter Yancone, Stone originally wanted to use reinforced concrete for the exterior rather than bricks. It was a time when examples of “brutalist’’ architecture were emerging in Baltimore and elsewhere, as seen in projects such as the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre by John Johansen and the McKeldin Fountain by Thomas Todd.
Stone had been selected largely because of his reputation as an experienced designer of museums and other cultural institutions, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in Washington, D. C. in 1971.
Phoebe Stanton, an art history professor at Johns Hopkins University and an architecture critic who served on Baltimore’s Architectural Review Board, was influential in preventing the concrete exterior.
“Phoebe Stanton said, ‘If you do concrete the board won’t approve it,” and he changed the design, Peter Yancone, the science center’s senior educator.
While some people may think the windowless exterior was a response to the riots that followed the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and lingering fears about crime, that isn’t why the architect designed it that way, said Steve Himmelrich, former marketing director for the science center and now head of Himmelrich PR, a public relations firm that represents the institution.
Stone designed a building with few openings because he believed giving people inside a chance to look out the window would draw attention away from the interior spaces, Himmerich said.
“The architect’s philosophy of museums was that there should not be windows because that would detract” from the people and activities inside, Himmelrich said. “He did a lot of museums, none of which had windows.”
Stone also had a reputation for designing flat-roofed buildings that leaked, and Maryland’s science center no exception, Backstrom said.
During the groundbreaking ceremony, Backstrom and Yancone were recognized as two employees who were part of the staff when the building opened 50 years ago.
Backstrom, now in his late 80s, served asexecutive director from 1976 to 1987. He came to the science center with his wife Raylene, who was also celebrating a birthday. Yancone said he started as a clerk in the science center’s gift shop and switched to the education department two years later. Now part of the science center’s senior management team, he’s the last original employee on the staff.
Despite the early challenges that stemmed from being a pioneering institution on the waterfront, the science center found an audience. As other buildings opened – the World Trade Center Baltimore in 1977; the Baltimore Convention Center in 1979, Harborplace in 1980’ the Hyatt Regency Hotel and the National Aquarium in 1981 – it was no longer alone on the waterfront, although it was still set apart on the south side of the harbor basin.
Stone died in 1978 at age 76, and the Maryland Science Center was one of his last buildings to open. It started with three levels above ground, including a planetarium and an observatory – popular features after the 1969 moon landing.
After Stone’s death, the building was altered many times in ways that made it less austere and fortress-like. The original entrance faced Key Highway and was reoriented to face the Inner Harbor in the 1980s. An IMAX theater was added in 1987. A dinosaur wing was added in 2004, designed by Design Collective of Baltimore and featuring more than two dozen dinosaur skeletons. Many new exhibits have been added to encourage hands-on learning and repeat visits.
According to science center President and CEO Mark Potter, the science center has had more than 15 million visitors since 1976.
“Over the past 50 years, no other institution has reached more people who share our interest in science than the Maryland Science Center,” he said. “We welcome usually over 100,000 school students every year across the state of Maryland on field trips” and take programs to all 23 counties in the state.
Brick-lifting ceremony
The latest change to the building, a $2 million greening of the harbor entrance plaza and similar greening of the Key Highway entrance for school groups, is consistent with other efforts to ‘soften’ its appearance and make it more welcoming to visitors.
As designed by Mahan Rykiel Associates, the campus greening project calls for the mostly hardscape brick plaza to be turned into a landscaped green space with a sloping lawn, native plants, educational markers and a shade canopy. The bricks will be taken up and the land will be re-configured to support the new lawn and vegetation. The work has been designed to fit in with the improvements made to Rash Field to the east and West Shore Park to the north.
The groundbreaking was actually a brick-lifting ceremony, because participants weren’t really breaking ground. Participants used shovels to lift bricks, symbolizing the actual removal of bricks from the entrance plaza.
“We’re going to change from a hardscape of brick and concrete to a greenscape that matches the work of our neighbors,” Potter said. The brick plaza and concrete steps “will make way for sloping grass fields, new trees providing shade, native plants for pollinators and a new seating area.” In addition, he said, the new landscape “will seek to reduce our impact on the environment, including mitigating storm water runoff in the harbor.”
As part of the anniversary, the cost of admission on Saturday was rolled back to 1976 prices — $1 for children and $2.50 for adults. There was a long line of people waiting to get in at 10 a.m., just as the birthday ceremony was getting underway. Every level of the building was filled shortly after the doors opened.
The event also highlighted the completion of the center’s “Transforming Our Future: 50th Anniversary Campaign,” launched to raise funds to renovate facilities, improve sustainability and provide free and reduced-cost admission to students and Marylander on SNAP or WIC. The original goal was $10 million but the campaign ended up raising $15.2 million, 50 percent more than the original figure.
Actual work on the plaza will begin in the fall, after the summer tourist season ends. Before the brick-lifting portion of the ceremony, speakers talked about the role the science center plays in the Inner Harbor – and the life of the city and state.
‘Under the bones of a dinosaur’
Gov. Wes Moore, who like many of the speakers wasn’t born when the science center opened, talked about the symbolic gesture of making a public institution the first major building in the Inner Harbor’s transformation. (The site was officially secured in 1966 following approval by city voters – before the MLK assassination-related riots of 1968. Ground was broken in 1971 using a lunar drill from the Apollo program.)
“When Baltimore set out to reimagine and reinvent the Inner Harbor,” Moore said, “it started with a science center. It started with a place where a child can walk under the bones of a dinosaur, to make sure that our children were going to be the priority.”
Moore said his administration supports the science center because its mission is consistent with the state’s goal of educating Maryland children to become leaders in fields ranging from astronomy to quantum computing to medicine. His administration has provided funds to support the science center each year he has been Governor: $4.4 million in Fiscal Years 2024 and 2025, $3 million in Fiscal 2026 and $200,000 in Fiscal 2027.
“A world-class mission deserves a world-class facility,” Moore said. “No one leaves the Maryland Science Center with all of the answers but everybody leaves here with better questions and a better understanding of how we fit into this big, beautiful world.”
Before anyone becomes a scientist, Moore said, they have to be curious and they have to have a place where that curiosity is going to be supported and developed.
“For 50 years the Maryland Science Center has been exactly that, and we must make sure we are investing so that for the next 50 years the Maryland Science Center can be exactly that,” he said. “We are grateful for the years that this place has made Maryland better.”
‘This place is heaven’
Maryland Senate president Bill Ferguson, also under 50, said the Science Center can be a lifesaver for parents with young children.
Ferguson said he can recall Saturday afternoons “when it was raining outside and I had two- and four-year-old kids, and I thought ‘if we spend one more minute in this house, one of them may not make it out.’ It is the Water Play exhibit in the science center that has truly saved the Ferguson family. And so for that reason alone and for the hundreds of thousands of other families who have had that moment in the science center of saying, ‘Whew, this place is heaven,’ we want to say thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“For the record, we love when it rains,”Potter told him.
More seriously, Ferguson said, the improvements to the science center and nearby Rash Field are important to the city and the way it’s perceived.
“We’re at an unbelievably important time,” he said, “an important time for this city.” He called it a “moment in time where we are in a place of inflection, at a point of reenvisioning, at a point of saying what we have is not enough and we deserve more.”
After waiting many years to see improvements to Rash Field, the first phase is complete and the second phase will open later this year – also with state funding support.
“If you walk [from the science center towards Rash Field], you will hear kids yelling and screaming and having a blast,” Ferguson said at the birthday event. “You will see parents enjoying a beautiful new setting. You will see a construction site that is totally reenvisioning and reimagining what this space can be for the next 50 years. As we say ‘Happy Birthday’ to the science center, what we are also saying is we are so unbelievably fortunate for having assets like this here in this state.”
‘The front yard of Maryland’
Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman, another speaker who wasn’t born when the science center opened, said her children have benefitted from going there.
“This is where my son discovered space,” she said. “This is where my daughter, I kid you not, built a miniature weather vane that she keeps in her room ‘til today…I look at my kids and I’m proud that they have the opportunity to do those things. I want to be sure that every child has the opportunity to do those things and you all make that happen.”
The science center is a place that helps children understand the world better, Lierman said.
“A child discovering that they can figure out how the world works, it’s empowering to that child and helps translate into their school work and more,” she said. “That’s really what the Maryland Science Center has been giving to Maryland families for 50 years.”
While more than 400,000 visitors go to the science center every year, the impact goes far beyond a visitor count, she continued.
“Think about what that means compounded over half a century,” she said. “Generations of Marylanders who have had a moment in this building that stuck with them — who went home, who asked a question that they never thought to ask before. Some of them are scientists today. Some of them are engineers, doctors, teachers. Some of them work here today. And some of them are just people a little bit more curious about the world and that’s so important, especially today.”
Lierman also praised the campus greening project for helping create a positive impression for visitors. She noted that the Science Center and the Inner Harbor are often the first areas that out-of-towners see when they come to Baltimore – “a city that they may not have seen the best news about sometimes.”
The harbor plaza renovation “will demonstrate the way that we build sustainably and beautifully to welcome people to the city of Baltimore,” she said. “This Inner Harbor is the front yard of Maryland and today we are taking a big step in greening our front yard, which is exciting.”
Howard County Executive Calvin Ball III agreed that the science center is a place that sparks kids’ imaginations.
At the science center, he said, “we are not just in a building, but we are helping build the builders, those who are going to look at the future and not just see what is but what can be, and write our next best chapter.”
Ball added that he doesn’t think turning 50 makes something old.
“As someone who is 50,” he said, “I can tell you it is very young.”
‘A welcome invitation’
No one representing Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration spoke at the event or took part in the brick-lifting ceremony. Former Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, City Council member Zachary Blanchard, Comptroller Bill Henry and Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore president Dan Taylor were in the audience.
Potter said all of the capital improvements and programs reflect the science center’s primary goal of giving the citizens of Maryland a world class facility, “one that is accessible, inclusive and brings science to life through exciting exhibits, an engaging staff and outreach programs beyond our walls.”
Admission fees alone “are not enough for us to reach our goals,” he said. “We must rely on public support and private support – support from individual donors, funds from the corporate community and of course grants from foundations.”
Potter said the Maryland Science Center’s mission is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.
“In 1976 we were innovators and trailblazers, starting the momentum that led to one of the country’s most celebrated urban redevelopments,” he said. “Five decades later, and with the renovation of our harborside entrance, we’re still a model for informal science education, the joy of scientific discovery and creating a welcome invitation to Baltimore and Maryland.”
