Forty years ago this week, Charles the Prince of Wales married Lady Diana Spencer; “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “For Your Eyes Only” were tops at the box office; Jessie’s Girl by Rick Springfield was No. 1 on the radio and Rachel Meghan Markle was born in Los Angeles.
In Baltimore, the big news was the long-awaited opening of the National Aquarium, a five-level, $21.3 million aquatic museum that was conceived to help create jobs, revitalize the Inner Harbor and “inspire conservation of the world’s aquatic treasures,” as its mission statement puts it.
The grand opening had been delayed by a month — made famous by then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s famous dip in the seal pool several weeks before. But the crowds finally showed up when the doors opened on Aug. 8, 1981 and, except for the COVID-19 pandemic, they haven’t really let up since.
For years one of the busiest days at the National Aquarium was its anniversary, Aug. 8, when admission was free and special activities were scheduled throughout the day.
This year there won’t be free admission on Aug. 8 because the aquarium is still operating under COVID-related attendance restrictions and can’t have long lines.
Instead, aquarium leaders joined local and state elected officials Tuesday to thank them for the roles they played in raising $7.75 million for an unconventional construction project that will help get the building in shape for the next 40 years.
They also looked back at some of the aquarium’s accomplishments over the past 40 years, starting with that fact 56 million people have visited the aquarium since it opened. Annually, the aquarium generates more than $450 million in economic activity, $30 million in state and local tax revenues and 4,500 jobs in the region.
The construction project involves replacing 684 panes in the glass pyramid atop the Upland Tropical Rain Forest exhibit, after a few shattered starting in 2019.
The replacement glass will be “fritted” so it’s bird-friendly, and the aquarium will be able to illuminate the pyramid at night with LED lights in a variety of colors, including orange for the Orioles and purple for the Ravens – making the lights bird-friendly, too.
The construction work is slated to begin next March and be complete by the fall of 2022. The state of Maryland provided $7 million for the project; the city of Baltimore allocated $450,000; Baltimore County gave $200,000 and private donors such as the Abell Foundation contributed the remainder needed to reach the goal.
“For the past 40 years, the National Aquarium has served not only as a tourist destination and educational resource, but also as a major economic anchor for Baltimore City,” said Gov. Larry Hogan, who attended Tuesday’s event. “Our administration has been proud to strongly support the aquarium’s continued success.”
Unlike other aquariums that were funded largely by “billionaire benefactors” from the private sector, the National Aquarium “was built by the grit and determination of a can-do city and its taxpayers,” and it wouldn’t exist without the strong support it has received from the public sector, starting with Hogan and the State of Maryland, said Aquarium CEO John Racanelli.
Without Hogan’s support for the repairs to the glass pyramid, “we might have been forced to indefinitely close one of our defining exhibits in the most recognizable feature of Baltimore’s skyline,” Racanelli said.
Racanelli and Hogan also noted that attendance at the Inner Harbor attraction is returning to pre-pandemic levels, with attendance in both June and July of 2021 actually exceeding figures during the same months in 2019.
After the lockdown of early 2020, “our mission for 2020 was to survive,” Racanelli said. “For 2021, it was to sustain operations and really get through and move towards 2022, where we hoped to thrive. Lucky for us, people have shown up and in fact we’re back to our attendance levels of 2019 as of this summer…Our future is bright in great measure because of the support we receive from the state, the city and the county.”
Along with outlining plans for the roof improvements, Racanelli gave Baltimore Fishbowl an update on how the aquarium has been doing since the pandemic began and the status of other projects it has in the works.
Restrictions on capacity: Although the aquarium was operating at one point during the pandemic with admissions limited to 25% of peak capacity, the percentage has inched up as more people get vaccinated and public health guidelines allow.
The aquarium still isn’t operating at full capacity, and registrations are still required to ensure admission, although walk-up tickets may be available if time slots aren’t sold out. Masks are required for staff and requested for visitors. But attendance is clearly up.
“Probably the busiest [period] of the year thus far has been the weekend of the Fourth of July,” Racanelli said. “We’re still operating somewhere in the range of about 60% of our peak capacity that we would comfortably allow into the aquarium.”
Racanelli said the aquarium is currently admitting about 600 people per hour during peak hours, compared to 1,000 people per hour under regular capacity.
The restrictions mean no big crowds for the anniversary, Racanelli said.
“We’re going to do some celebratory things for the people who are lucky enough or nostalgic enough to show up on the anniversary day,” he said. In addition, “we are going to do a little staff party in the week leading up to it. We of course never get to do any staff things on weekends because that’s when we’re so busy, but we are going to celebrate with staff on Wednesday and Thursday.”
Instead of a large event on the anniversary itself, Racanelli said they will celebrate “various aspects” of the aquarium’s history throughout its 40th year.
Attendance projections: In 2019, before COVID, the aquarium had 1.15 million visitors. In 2020, affected by the pandemic, the number dropped to less than half that figure: 440,000 visitors. For 2021, Racanelli said, the aquarium has projected that attendance will be 75.1% of its “normal,” pre-pandemic attendance, or 845,000 people.
As of July 12, with capacity restrictions relaxed somewhat and more people getting vaccinated, the aquarium’s attendance was running “10% ahead of where we thought we would be” for 2021, he said.
After a period of seeing no school buses from March 2020 to the spring of 2021, Racanelli said, the aquarium is again seeing some school buses bringing students enrolled in summer programs and some tour buses, which is “inducing great hope.”
Attracting out-of-town visitors: Racanelli said the aquarium has seen a dip in attendance by people from metro Baltimore, due to COVID and other reasons. At the same, he said, the aquarium continues to attract visitors from outside the metro area. He said the current breakdown of year-round visitors has remained at about 25 percent from the Baltimore area – “which in normal years might be about 350,000 to 400,000 people” — and 75 percent from outside the Baltimore metro area.
“As a generator of business to Baltimore, the aquarium is really pretty unique,” he said. “It’s bringing a lot of new dollars into the community and, frankly, into the state. And yet I think that number – 350,000 to 400,000 people from within the state – is probably one of the highest attendances at any paid attraction in the state for Marylanders.”
Racanelli said crime and safety issues don’t seem to be as much of a deterrent for out-of-town visitors as they are for some Baltimore residents. Those out-of-town visitors, he said, are largely responsible for keeping the aquarium’s attendance numbers as high as they are.
“The interesting thing about the aquarium is that it is a magnet,” he said. “It is a magnet with a really strong attraction, and it pulls people from afar. And people who don’t live in our metropolitan area and don’t consume our media are a whole lot less inflamed by, or afraid of, our city. They come to Baltimore and they expect an urban experience.”
In terms of Baltimore area residents who may be reluctant to come downtown, “we have felt an impact” at the aquarium, he said. “We know that our own metropolitan area is visiting us less than they used to, especially the people who live outside the city. So that’s surprising. We still serve hundreds of thousands of …people from the city and the four surrounding counties. But we serve proportionally more people now than we used to from D. C., from Philly, even from central [Pennsylvania.]”
Part of the aquarium’s contribution to the city is that it brings people together, he said.
“I’ve always been a believer that one of the things the National Aquarium accomplishes is that it’s a great mixing opportunity for people who would otherwise have no contact with each other,” he said. “When an Amish family comes in from Harrisburg and they meet a Muslim family from Washington, D. C., while touring the aquarium together, I feel like it’s one of our great accomplishments — those little [moments] of diplomacy, that we create those casual inadvertent collisions and interactions between people that are so important to our future as a nation.”
For the aquarium, at least, any drop in attendance by locals who may be reluctant to come downtown has been countered by a resurgence in attendance from out-of-town visitors, he said.
“We have felt the pain of some of the reluctance that we’re seeing,” he said. “But I think we’ve also seen an even greater resurgence of interest from people who are not from Baltimore, and that is driving the fact that, as of today, we are way further ahead against our ‘normal attendance,’ than we expected to be.”
For the year, “we’re still behind 2019,” he said. “But we’re actually sitting at 82% of 2019. We had hoped, in our wildest dreams, to end the year at 75% of 2019. So we’re sitting well above that if this trend continues.”
Lights on the aquarium roof: The aquarium hasn’t yet selected a glass fabricator for the rain forest roof, Racanelli said. “There are 25 such firms and none, unfortunately, in Maryland, but we’re homing in.”
The aquarium’s waterfront campus plan: Before the pandemic, the aquarium was seeking to raise $14 million for design and construction from private sources to complete its next big project, a network of “floating wetlands” between Piers 3 and 4.
The aquarium had raised $11 million toward that goal by late 2019, including $3 million from lead sponsor CFG Bank and $2 million from Whiting-Turner Contracting Company.
Racanelli said the aquarium hopes to meet its fundraising goal for the wetlands project by the end of 2022. That would allow construction to begin in 2023 and be complete sometime in 2023 or 2024. “We’re chipping away” at the goal, he said. “I’m confident we can do it.”
The dolphin sanctuary: The National Aquarium has a goal of creating a “dolphin sanctuary,” where its Atlantic bottlenose dolphins could eventually be relocated, a natural setting rather than their current habitat inside the Marine Mammal Pavilion on Pier 4.
The original goal was to settle on a site and relocate the dolphins by the end of 2020, but that date has been pushed back because the search has taken longer than expected, and then COVID-19 and associated travel restrictions caused additional delays. The last thing the aquarium wants to do, directors say, is move the dolphins to a location that turns out to be unhealthy for them because of pollution or other factors.
Racanelli said the search for a location has narrowed. “The best I can tell you right now is we’re focused on the Caribbean,” he said. “We have our eyes on Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands. We intend to stay within the U. S. and its territories…We have a good relationship with NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and we want to keep that.”
People do move dolphins out of the United States, but “it effectively is an export and there are a lot of rules governing how that can be done,” he continued. “We made a decision early on: We exist under the auspices of NOAA and within the strictures of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and we want to continue to.”
Studio Gang of Chicago, headed by MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Jeanne Gang and her husband Mark Schendel, is the architect of record for the dolphin sanctuary. “They are truly engaged in it,” Racanelli said. “They really want to see it happen. They have contributed a lot of their own time and energy and resources.”
In the meantime, the dolphins are doing well in their home on Pier 4, he said.
“They’ve never been better. They’ve got a good life right now, as good a life as we can give them here because they don’t do demos, shows, anything. They get to be dolphins all day long, and people come and observe them and we talk about them. We invite people to follow their journey. We talk about where they eventually will be living when we do get to the sanctuary.”
Upgrading the galleries: During the pandemic, the aquarium has been renovating each of the galleries on Levels 2, 3 and 4 of the building on Pier 3. “There are a total of six to eight galleries and we refresh those by both upgrading the exhibit itself, making the life support system and the habitat better [and] by completely making over the interpretive component,” Racanelli said.
“A great comparison is to go through the aquarium, walk through Levels 2 and 3 and then look at Level 4. You can really see the contrast,” he said. “Level 4 is now cued up for work. It was deferred by COVID but we’ve got some of the design work done and we’re doing a gentle kind of light version that will be completed by the end of this year to upgrade the graphics. Then the big work will occur next year so that by the end of 2022, Level 4 will look like Levels 2 and 3.”
Stronger conservation message: Racanelli said the aquarium hasn’t been able to call much attention to the gallery improvements because some of the work took place just as COVID-19 was hitting and people couldn’t get into the building to see it.
One change in areas such as the Maryland: Mountains to the Sea exhibit, Racanelli said, is that they impart a stronger conservation message, providing “examples of hope” that show what people can do to protect the Chesapeake Bay and other places. “It’s themed around the idea that water connects us all,” he said.
The Harbor View Room has been renovated: Featuring a glass wall that overlooks the Inner Harbor and downtown skyline, this fourth level gathering space recently reopened following a makeover. Though it has a food stand and videos that show behind-the-scenes activities at the aquarium, “it’s mainly a space for families to pull over to the side and enjoy the view” of the city, Racanelli said.
One feature that’s missing from the room is a sepia-toned mural that showed what Baltimore’s working waterfront looked like in 1906. Why did the mural disappear? “There was asbestos in the floors and the walls,” Racanelli said.
Animal Care and Rescue Center: In-person tours of the three-year-old facility at 901 East Fayette Street have been suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic but likely will resume by early next year, Racanelli said.
A satellite in Washington, D. C.: The National Aquarium’s facility in the nation’s capitol closed in 2013 when the federally-owned building it shared with the U. S. Commerce Department, the Herbert C. Hoover Building, shut down for renovations. There was talk about reopening it someday, somewhere, but nothing is in the works right now.
“There was a dream” of the Washington aquarium reopening, Racanelli said. “I think it collapsed under the weight of the potential costs in a federal facility where, thanks to Homeland Security requirements, it was no longer able to be a place that was very welcoming. Once the Commerce Building site was lost, the idea of an aquarium in the Capitol has continued to enchant people, until they find out how expensive it is to build an aquarium.”
To create a major aquarium from the ground up in the United States in the next decade likely would cost more than 10 times what the National Aquarium cost in 1981, Racanelli said. “To be at the kind of world-class level that we’re talking about for [Baltimore] or Georgia or Monterey Bay or the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, you’re talking at least a quarter of a billion dollars.”
The Aquarium in space: Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic and a big supporter of the National Aquarium and its dolphin sanctuary initiative, didn’t take any mementos from the Baltimore institution that he could pull out of his pocket and display after his July 11 ride to the edge of space, the way he showed photos of his kids, his parents and comedian Stephen Colbert.
“Darn it, no, not that we’re aware of. I feel like we missed an opportunity,” Racanelli said. But there’s always next time: “We’re thinking of sending him a Thank You card from the dolphins or something.”
