The recently trumpeted expansion of Downtown Baltimore isn’t really an expansion. It’s the end of downtown as we’ve always known it.

It may seem like insufferable hubris when the developers declare in the slick brochure that Harbor East is “the city’s new center,” but it is also, for the moment, true.

Downtown used to have a very specific function. It was the center of the surrounding region, the hub upon which the metropolitan spokes revolved. But in the 21st century, that’s so over – replaced by “lifestyle choices” that reflects the niche marketing that dominates all aspects of the postmodern era. So, Legg Mason had little reason to stay in their office tower — located at the very confluence of the downtown crossroads — and found it a logical progression to move out twelve blocks to the tip of Harbor East, where they could be right on the waterfront instead of several blocks away. The firm’s former landlord, trying to fill the now-abandoned office space, chose not to tout its superior transit access, but instead built yet another big new parking garage to add to the dozen or so that already dominate Lombard Street.

Ritz Carlton Condos

Other celebrated new developments of the expanded downtown also demonstrate the erosion of downtown’s traditional functional advantages. Tide Point is on a tip of the Locust Point peninsula with no mass transit access, except recently introduced water taxis. The Ritz Carlton condos are a gated community virtually surrounded by water and open space at the foot of Federal Hill.

The Canton waterfront is dominated by a huge Safeway supermarket that is functionally identical to those in the suburbs, but is still able to serve as a place for urban “scene,” a place to see and be seen, for those who want to have their urban cake and eat it too. Canton Crossing and Brewers Hill are dominated by huge buildings combining downtown’s iconography with seas of surface parking. Heritage Crossing is a fantasy island of Olmsted dreams. Even traditional rowhouse streets are being transformed from urban living rooms for stoop-sitters into angle parking lots.

Parking on Gough Street

Heritage Crossing behind MLK Blvd

Baltimore’s historic relationship with the waterfront has been turned inside out. The Chesapeake Bay was once our umbilical cord to the world, and now serves mostly as our primary open space.

‘BURBIFICATION OF THE CITY
Downtown was once the center of a metropolitan wheel with outward spokes that started as roads, then later became streetcar lines. For many decades, planners have attempted to update these spokes, first with urban expressways and then with rail transit lines. But events have overtaken these efforts and transportation no longer defines the city at all.

Metropolitan Baltimore is now just a loosely aggregated association of all the demographic groups that comprise our diverse society, manifest as sprawl that extends not just into farmland, but within the city as well.

Suburban sprawl is marked by a drastic weakening of ties to the city. The Beltway and surrounding highways make urban activities all but irrelevant to many of these people. But many city neighborhoods are oblivious to downtown as well, the booming new ones as well as those that have been bypassed by downtown prosperity and have sunk into deep poverty – the famously-decried “rot beneath the glitter.”

Meanwhile, recent downtown expansion has had little to do with downtown’s traditional hub function, and everything to do with the postmodern urban lifestyle – a rebellion against the iconographic “conformity” of suburbia, even while suburbia has undergone its own radical lifestyle nichifications.

WHAT CITIES HAVE: A “SCENE”

Still, the old dominant downtown is not coming back, any more than Michael Jackson, John Lennon or Elvis will rise from the dead to reunite mass culture and rescue it from “American Idol”, “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” or Paris Hilton.

Baltimore can only go with the flow. We just need to know where its leading if we want to steer along the best course:

1. Everything nowadays relates to lifestyle – Calling them Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” or David Brooks’ “Bourgeois Bohemians” may oversimplify or overflatter, but it’s on the right track.

2. Everything must be integrated – The big urban advantage is juxtaposition – the great petri dish where culture clashes create new experiences. So I’m obliged to mention the Red Line here: It is sheer madness to create a separate underworld culture as our pathetic attempt to sell mass transit to a highly skeptical populace. New transit must be a centerpiece.

Hopkins Biotech Park

3. Everything and everyone must be included – The “new downtown” has been mostly a white phenomenon, despite efforts to portray it or shape it as a post-racial, Obama-era phenomenon. Meanwhile Baltimore still has many all-black areas, of the old-school, pre-post-racial variety, some intact, many greatly distressed, but all quite separate. We must break through the barriers and find a way to inject vitality into everyone’s Baltimore. Not just metaphorically, by using fancy prose like this. Not literally, by totally demolishing communities such as Franklin-Mulberry, as we did in the 1960s, and Middle East next to Hopkins Hospital, as we did in the 2000s, but by poking strategic holes in our body armour.

Yes, knocking down part of the Jones Falls Expressway can open up Old Town to the northeast, but knocking down the MLK/Franklin-Mulberry interchange to the northwest can do even more. Downtown can’t continue to be a walled city, if it wants to reinvent itself.

Canton Crossing parking

4. Infill is important – The vast seas of parking around Canton Crossing and Brewers Hill are referred to as “land banking” for future development, but it is important that we not allow these developments to be an urban caricature of suburbia.

5. Try not to be too grandiose – Yes, high density is nice, as urbanists everywhere have explained. But densities will find their own level based on what the land is really worth. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking Baltimore can be another Manhattan. Is the land under State Center really so valuable as to support its proposed multi-billion dollar development? Or is it just another piece of Baltimore real estate looking for its rightful place, shackled by the overselling of its two rail transit lines that have yielded very little return for decades?

It all boils down to our search for an urban identity. Downtown Baltimore is no longer what it was. It just needs to be. . . something else.