The Greater Baltimore Committee’s proposed super-sized Convention Center is staying on the front page by being explained one factoid at a time. The latest, revealed last week, is the price tag – $750 million to $930 million.

That quoted price suggests the GBC knows it’s likely to be a billion dollar project, but doesn’t want to use the b-word. Sort of like a $999.99 TV or a $2.99 and nine-tenths-of-a-cent  gallon of gas.

Other than that, the recent discussion has mostly revolved around timing.

It’s expected to take 6  to 7 years to build, and Willard Hackerman, owner of the Sheraton Hotel which now sits on the construction site, wants the on-site replacement hotel to be completed before the existing hotel is torn down. That would greatly increase the complexity of the project (and guarantee that hotel guests would be serenaded by construction noise and dust for a long time.)

Complex timing issues also ensure that the cost estimate must be correspondingly vague. Years of inflation and construction coordination could easily push the project beyond that psychological billion dollar barrier.

The one-revelation-at-a-time media management also allows the GBC to keep repeating their sales pitch for maximum effect.

Another suburban-style commercial fortress?

GBC president Donald C. Fry declined  last week to release renderings of the proposal until Governor O’Malley has a chance to see them. He obviously wants to give the boss a reason to show up for his personal show-and-tell. Instead, Fry reiterated that there are “few options” to expand the Convention Center, which he described as essentially landlocked by surrounding development.

Ironically, one of these developments is the City-owned Hilton convention hotel across Howard Street, which has only been completed for less than two years. One wonders why convention center expansion was not considered as part of that project, when the downtown power brokers ordered it up? After all, the new sprawling Hilton takes up two full city blocks, almost as much land as the original convention center.

That also makes one wonder whether GBC is really interested in long range planning at all. Putting everything they want – convention center, hotel, retail, parking – all in one building connected to an arena is essentially an anti-urban concept. Instead of organically interacting with the city, which is what the whole idea of a downtown is all about, it allows conventioneers to wake up, walk down the hallway from one organized predetermined activity to the next, eat dinner and go back to bed.  Z Z Z Z Z Z ….The all-in-one concept is for shopping malls, not downtowns.

Fossilizing the future

So, after GBC’s shiny new billion dollar convention center expansion is finally completed in the 2020s or 2030s, we would still be left to solve the puzzle of “what next?” We’d still have a downtown that’s a patchwork of empty lots and disconnected, pedestrian-unfriendly, publicly-subsidized commercial fortresses.

This ‘roided-up convention center would, for instance, do nothing to resolve the question of what to do with the long-vacant McCormick site kitty-corner across Conway Street, which is directly across the street from the deadening Hyatt Hotel parking garage and the alien Conway/Light Street traffic tangle.

The decision to allow Conway Street to be a traffic sewer, disoriented from its surroundings, was made way back in the 1970s when Conway became the primary extension of Interstate 395, and the Otterbein neighborhood was concurrently being newly rebuilt with its back to it. Then, when the convention center was being expanded, a truck tunnel was built in Conway’s median strip. Those decisions are as close to permanent as it gets.

Building GBC’s proposed nearly-billion dollar mega-structure would further fossilize these harsh surroundings. The city needs to think long and hard before building such a huge edifice in the heart of downtown. The existing First Mariner Arena has had a quite negative and impossible-to-overcome effect on Howard Street over its 50 year life. The new arena needs a site like Camden Yards (see previous Brew story) where it can unite and incorporate budding urban areas like Westport and Gateway South with downtown, rather than just dominating its environment.

Fortunately, people don’t appear to be buying GBC’s group-think.

It’s amazing that just a few weeks ago, the decision of the previous mayor, Sheila Dixon, to rebuild the arena on its existing site was still accepted as a “given.” But the floodgates opened as soon as new mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake let it be known that she was not bound by that decision. On November 21st, The Sun published a list of ten candidate sites. As part of the accompanying story, M. J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the city’s quasi-public Baltimore Development Corp, specifically cited the Camden Yards site as one to be considered, even though it was not on The Sun’s list.