What will it take to revitalize Harborplace? A panel of experts, including Harborplace developer P. David Bramble, shares thoughts about ‘connecting the dots’

Few people would deny that the Harborplace pavilions, once considered a crown jewel of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, need to be revitalized. But is Baltimore ready to do what it takes to bring the area back to life?  And if it isn’t ready now, what’s missing?

That was the question posed at a recent panel discussion about downtown Baltimore’s future, as developer P. David Bramble prepares to take ownership of the two pavilions at Pratt and Light streets, which are nearly vacant after being overseen by a court-appointed receiver for the past several years. 

The discussion took place, fittingly, inside the Light Street Pavilion of Harborplace, where the former H&M store was transformed into Baltimore’s newest meeting and events space. The panel discussion was convened by The Baltimore Business Journal, with the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore as the presenting sponsor.

The BBJ asked civic leaders to talk about The Future of Cities, as part of a series led by its parent company, American City Business Journals. The panelists included Bramble, Managing Partner of MCB Real Estate, the company working to revitalize Harborplace; Colin Tarbert, president and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation; Dr. Bruce Jarrell, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB); and Terri Harrington, managing principal of Harrington Commercial Real Estate Services. Shelonda Stokes, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, provided opening remarks. Rhonda Pringle, market publisher and president of the BBJ, was the panel’s moderator.  

The two-hour event drew about 140 people last week, including Laurie Schwartz, president of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore; Al Hutchinson, president and CEO of Visit Baltimore; Matthew “Mac” Campbell, executive director of the Baltimore Convention Center; and a cross section of local business leaders.

Many were drawn by the chance to hear from Bramble and look inside the Light Street Pavilion, which has been largely off limits to the public in recent months. The H&M store was last used as a pop-up athletic gear shop during the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association basketball tournaments in February and was still filled with jackets and other sportswear bearing logos from various college teams. ;./MCB, the venue sponsor, set up chairs and a stage in the main retail space, and David and Dad’s Café provided pastries and coffee.

Baltimore’s Board of Estimates last month approved an amendment to the 1979 ground lease that recognized an affiliate of Bramble’s MCB Real Estate, MCB HP Baltimore LLC, as the new owner of the Harborplace pavilions, which occupy land owned by the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore.

In the amendment, MCB HP Baltimore replaced the previous lessee, Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation, which lost control of the property after running into financial problems. The amendment paves the way for Bramble, who was announced as the prospective buyer of Harborplace in April 2022, to launch a wide-ranging redevelopment of the property.

Under contract

Bramble, on crutches, told the audience that MCB hasn’t yet settled on the property but is getting close.

“We’re in contract and we’re waiting for…all the legal stuff that has to happen to actually close,” he said. In the meantime, he said, MCB has been working with the court-appointed receiver to gain access to the buildings during the planning process and bring in short-term tenants such as Crust by Mack, a Black-owned and family-run bakery, which was announced in March.

Bramble said he doesn’t have a final development plan for Harborplace and intends to lead a “community engagement process” to help arrive at a vision for how the property should be redeveloped.

One thing that is already clear, he said, is that the reimagined Harborplace property will not be a shopping mall, with interior corridors leading to outward-facing stores and restaurants on the perimeter, the way it was in the past. “It won’t be this,” he said, looking around. “You’re not going to have an interior mall, anymore.”

Bramble said that whatever takes shape on the property will be a mixture of uses, which could include residences, offices and retail space. He said he is counting on the community engagement process to help his team determine the exact mix of uses. He did not discuss how much of the existing buildings will be retained.

Mixed-use is the wave of the future for cities, he said.

“I think, long term, every city, every downtown development, is going to be some sort of mixed-use,” he said. “What are the mixed uses? I don’t know. That is about math. But we absolutely see mixed-use, 100 percent.”

Assets and liabilities

Much of the panel discussion focused on what has to happen, both within Harborplace and outside the boundaries of Harborplace, to make its redevelopment a success. The discussion was sparked by questions from Pringle that touched on the city’s assets and liabilities: What strengths can Baltimore build on? What is Baltimore lacking? Why does ‘now’ feel like the right time for a renaissance?

Harrington, the real estate broker, said she’d like to see Baltimore become more cohesive as a city.

“I feel like we’ve had several mini-Renaissances, frankly, if you look at Harbor East and you look at Harbor Point and you look at what’s happened in South Baltimore,” she said. “I live in Locust Point: Mark Sapperstein. McHenry Row. What’s happening in Port Covington and over in Canton. I just feel like we’ve had a lot of mini-Renaissances. But I feel like we’ve failed…to connect the dots. We have all these great projects happening, but there’s no cohesion with the projects.”

One part of town that breaks up the cohesion, Harrington said, is the former site of the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre, which has been an empty lot since a developer tore the theater down starting in 2014 but then never moved ahead with a replacement project.

“We can’t keep condemning properties and then not having a plan,” Harrington said. “When we do a development, we need to have a strategic plan to make sure that the developer and the powers that be are all on the same page. That’s why I think Harborplace is so important, when we talk about connecting the dots.”

Sense of optimism

Tarbert, of the BDC, said the city didn’t condemn the Mechanic theater, but he acknowledged that the property at Baltimore and Charles streets is “a big hole in the ground that we want to see developed.”

Tarbert said he believes many people have a sense of optimism about downtown because they’re seeing some long-awaited projects taking shape, such as the new home of Lexington Market and the CFG Bank Arena.

“I’ve been doing this long enough where I can tell where the momentum is moving and where it’s happening, and I think the next decade…is downtown’s decade,” he said. “We’ve talked about projects for a long time. Part of those projects were on the way. But now they’re real. You can go to Lexington Market. You can go to Barry Manilow at the CFG Bank Arena. So I think people now believe that things really are happening. We’ve talked about Harborplace for many years and I think people now have a sense that this is real and this is going to happen. I think those things are what’s going to drive development downtown.”

Tarbert also said he thinks Baltimore is not alone in the issues it faces in supporting redevelopment initiatives.

“We’re not unique,” he said. “We always look at Baltimore a little bit in a bubble…Other downtowns are struggling with basically all of the same issues that we have. There was an article this morning talking about the office market. But it was from the viewpoint of ‘wow, there’s a lot of inexpensive real estate’ — that from a development standpoint it’s hard to build high rises, it’s hard to build office buildings, and they’re relatively inexpensive now. So I think that people are going to be looking at downtown really as an opportunity, and Baltimore is well positioned to be able to demonstrate the successes that we have. We also have a lineup of really exciting projects like Harborplace that are going to come to fruition in the near future.”

Two cities

Bramble agreed.

“I think Colin is 100 percent right,” he said. “A lot of good stuff is actually already happening in Baltimore. We tend to focus on the negative. But the truth is, there are really cool neighborhoods and a lot of stuff happening…If you look at Harbor East, it rivals developments all over the East Coast. Same thing with Baltimore Peninsula and what’s going on in those other neighborhoods, so that’s a good thing.”

But the “bad news” is that certain other parts of the city haven’t prospered, and “I think that’s kind of overwhelming us,” Bramble said.

“The parts of the city like where I live, in West Baltimore, just look worse, right? And I’ve been living in this part of West Baltimore my entire life. It looks definitively worse than it did, whatever, 40 years ago. So I think that’s what hangs over our heads…We kind of have, like, two cities. I don’t think that’s unique to Baltimore. I think you can see that all over the place.”

Bramble said the ‘two cities’ need to be connected more, “to make sure that instead of just seeing some parts of the city rise and other parts of the city fall, we actually get a wave of opportunity that gets the entire city to be on an upper trajectory.”

He said he senses a change in attitudes about the city and its trajectory.

“What’s different now — and I think this is really important, everyone is saying it, and I think this is the most important thing – is that people have the sense that we are at a point where if we don’t make those connections, concerted efforts, it won’t matter,” he said. “They’re willing to work together in a way that I have never seen before, all the time I’ve been developing and investing in this city” and in other cities. 

“There’s a sense of collaboration between stakeholders that we never really had before in Baltimore, and I think that’s what’s new, at least it seems new to me,” he said. “We see it around particular projects…like what they got done at Lexington Market…This is the first time people are saying, ‘We need to take a step back, look 30,000 feet, and [think about] how do we do something that’s a momentum-changer for the entire city?’”

As the city comes out of the pandemic and civic leaders look for ways to bring people back downtown after public health lockdowns, people seem to realize the value of working collaboratively, Bramble said.

 “Now you actually have the opportunity, where you couldn’t before,” he said. “Now everyone’s saying: We’ve got to think big. We’ve got to think about connecting all these dots, leveraging our anchor institutions and really pushing things forward.”

Bramble said he welcomes that spirit of cooperation.

“I’m excited about it,” he said. “I will tell you, I think it’s really here. It’s not going to happen in five minutes. It just isn’t. But it is, I think, actually going to happen at some point, so that when we wake up and we look back in a few years…we are going to say, holy crap, that actually worked.”

Radiating stars

Jarrell, the university president, said institutions such as UMB play a key role. 

“David used the word ‘anchor,” and ‘anchor institution’ is one [term] that’s been applied to a place like UMB,” he said. “Yet I think of it quite differently. I think of it as a star. There are a lot of stars downtown.”

Stars have internal parts and external parts, he said.

“UMB has a fabulous internal part to its star. Research. We have 15,000, 20,000 people coming in to Baltimore every day. It’s a premier place. We’ve got two new buildings going up, the School of Social Work and a brand new building in the [University of Maryland] BioPark.”

When others say connect the dots, he said, “I’m actually thinking of it a little bit differently. And that is, there’s this radiance around each of our stars. UMB has a radiance around it. And we really have a commitment to find what the connections are. The connections to me are partnerships. Who can we partner with? Who in the community can we partner with? Who in the business community can we partner with, so that the brilliance of David’s star down here [at Harborplace} begins to touch the brilliance of our star. It’s sort of connecting the dots, but it’s much broader than that, because to me it’s about partnerships.”

The UM BioPark west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a good example of a star that radiates outward, he said.

“We’ve had very good fortune with our partnerships west of Martin Luther King with the Wexford company,” the lead developer of the BioPark, he said. “We’ve got a whole BioPark that wasn’t there 15 years ago, and it’s an economic center to the region, for sure. We need that to happen on the east side of our campus as well, because that’s where the connection, where the brightness, is going to be” in terms of connecting to Harborplace’s renewal.

Jarrell said he’d like the Eutaw Street corridor to be stronger.

“I need to be able to walk down Eutaw Street and love every second of it,” he said. “To me, the word comes to mind: vibrance…I think connecting the brilliance of our stars is really important.“

Set of principles

Asked for more detail about his vision for Harborplace, Bramble said he and his associates at MCB aren’t thinking about how to reimagine Harborplace in isolation.

“My vision is not my vision,” he said. “My vision is the vision of Baltimore, coming together, to think about how this place can become a start. And this place was a start. It really was. For those of us who remember it…this was it. This was what we all remember. This is Baltimore. It’s one of the reasons we got engaged in this field.”

A tarnished Harborplace tarnishes the entire city, he said, because Harborplace was held up for many years as a symbol of Baltimore’s resilience and revitalization.

When a pension fund manager flies into town and sees that the city’s one-time crown jewel has gone downhill, “it impairs all of our assets,” Bramble said. “It impairs your ability to attract employees. It impairs my ability to raise capital. It impairs your ability to attract new businesses to Baltimore…It’s so important because of its symbolism.”

 While MCB can’t yet say exactly how it intends to redevelop Harborplace, Bramble said, it has come up with a set of principles to guide the planning process. Those principles include: safety and security; connectivity between whatever occupies the Harborplace property and other “assets” downtown; sustainability and inclusive economic development, which means engaging the public.

“We’re going to start a community engagement process hopefully very soon,” he said. “The concept is all about working with the community, with these general principles.”

Repairing aging infrastructure and planning for resiliency will be important parts of the redevelopment, he said.

“As you all know this infrastructure that’s here was built a really long time ago, and if you come back here after a heavy rain, you’ll see flooding,” he said. “This infrastructure is old and we need to reinvest in it.”

A balance

Ultimately, a reimagined Harborplace will be a balance between the vision that comes from the community and what can actually be financed and constructed, he said.

“We have to have these discussions…and see what will work from what the community wants to see and also what we can actually finance and build. That’s the other part to this, which is really important – what’s feasible,” he said.

“We do think that if we are successful, it won’t be because we just do something cool in here,” he said. “It will be because of what…everybody is saying. It’s all the connected dots that create this massive vibrancy that will allow you to enjoy yourself, feel great about Baltimore, all the way from President Street and Harbor East, down to the stadiums. That’s how we’re thinking about this.”

Showcasing Baltimore’s strengths

How can the city set the stage for a successful development? Pringle asked.

Tarbert pointed to Baltimore’s strengths, including its location and accessibility on the East Coast; its talented and highly-educated work force; its affordability compared to other cities, its growing anchor institutions, and the diversity and livability of its neighborhoods.

“I think it’s really about showcasing everything that Baltimore has and the momentum that we have,” he said. “I think once people see it, they understand it. They want to be part of it.”

When people come from out of town, “I think they see Baltimore in a much different light than maybe they read about,” he said. “And that’s really the diversity of the city in terms of the population but also our neighborhoods and our communities. I like to say that we’re a big town, we have all the amenities of a major city but we also have that small town feel. People ask you where you went to high school instead of college. Those are really kind of the things that when people come to Baltimore, they have an affinity for and want to be part of what the future is here.”

Baltimore needs more residents, Bramble said.

“The reality is that Baltimore is completely mispriced, right? Investors want to buy low and create value over time. Now is the time. Baltimore is mispriced. People don’t understand Baltimore. They think that it’s all bad, and if you walk down the street you’re going to get mowed down by some crazy person with a gun. It’s just complete crap. Sorry to use that word again. This place has some of the coolest neighborhoods, best restaurants. You have these amazing institutions. It’s all here. We’ve just got to spend more time trying to figure out [how to] attract a lot of the people who work at those places, how to get them to live here.  How do we get them affordable, nice options to be here? It’s low hanging fruit honestly.”

Baltimore would do better if its own citizens would be less negative, he said.

“Think about why people would come here if we gave them the opportunity – the places to live, the places to shop,” he said. “They would love to be here. We’ve got Maryland. We’ve got Hopkins. We’ve got Mercy [Hospital]. We’ve got all this waterfront. We’ve got a train station that can get you to D. C., to New York. Honestly, the proposition is easy, easy, easy to present to people.  But then when you get here, if everyone in Baltimore is so negative on it, that’s the part that can drag down the investor…The truth is, if you just wrote it down on paper, it’s all here. And what’s different now is everyone is ready to line up and say ‘OK, we have all these assets, let’s put them to work.’”

Equitable and inclusive

How can the city make sure development in the city is equitable and inclusive? Pringle asked.

“It has to be intentional,” Tarbert said. “At least that’s what I’ve learned seeing these projects…It’s part of the principles. It’s part of the original idea and it’s carried throughout the project…That’s what we’re trying to do at the citywide level in terms of intentionality, equity and inclusion…It’s just making sure that we get upfront and think about how to include people.”

In terms of reimagining Harborplace, Tarbert said, a logical first step to ensuring equity and inclusion is to do what Bramble has been talking about — “opening this whole process up to the community” and “hearing what people have to say,” then following through “each step of the way.”

“I think we’ve all said it,” Bramble agreed. “You really have to be intentional in how you do it so that people don’t feel like … it’s really not for me, it has nothing to do with me, they’re taking resources from me or that could come to me and somehow they’re going to the fancy part of town.”

Bramble said he knows it won’t be easy.

“It will require a lot of listening. It will require a lot of thinking about how to execute [the final plan.] But I do think it’s doable. We’ve done it lots of times before. This certainly will be the biggest challenge because there’s this sort of false juxtaposition that’s been set, of downtown versus neighborhoods.”

Bramble said he doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to pit Baltimore’s downtown against its neighborhoods.

“I’m sorry. That is just dumb. The truth is that if this part of the city fails, it won’t matter what we do in any neighborhoods. It won’t. This is the economic engine for the entire city. So if this part of Baltimore fails, if you’re not able to attract students and doctors and patients, if we don’t do these things, nothing else we do will matter.”