Is knocking down city buildings something to celebrate?

The question arose recently when we described the peppy “demolition events” held quite regularly by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to call attention to her Vacants to Value Program.

(This was in a story on one of these events that was abruptly canceled. It was followed by our analysis of an Abell Foundation report that shows the program has had some modest accomplishments but, overall, done little to reduce the city’s surfeit of blighted vacant houses.)

Just as that critical study was breaking on the eve of a summit at the Baltimore Convention Center celebrating the 5th anniversary of @BmoreV2V, city officials staged the archetypal “demolition event” for the media in Upton. Here’s a video of it.

The November 9 event, featuring the mayor, Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano and local television news crews, had all the classic elements:

• Old red bricks and weather-stained scalloped cornices being clawed into a heap presumably by the Housing Department’s favorite contractor, Pless “Demolition King” Jones. (The equipment is bringing  down rowhouses in the 600 block of Pitcher Street.)

• Heroic-but-hazy mayoral declarations about the program. (We’re “coordinating with our Crime and Grime Walks,” Rawlings-Blake says, “really talking about the successes we have had with Vacants to Value and strengthening neighborhoods.”)

• Hopeful remarks from community leaders. (“This plan has been on the table since 2005 as part of the Historic Pennsylvania Avenue Main Street,” one of them says, apparently without irony. Says another, “The idea is to have it taken down so that developers can come in and hopefully put something here that will complement the avenue from a commercial standpoint.”)

• Little touches from Graziano to suggest that the soon-to-be-vacant lot won’t remain vacant. (“So this is where the field would be,” he notes, “all the way along, right there.” Someone says, “Right. The ball field?” “Yeah,” he replies.)

• Bonus Feature: the mayor is given one of those sticks with litter-grabbing pincers at the end of it, which has been covered with plastic jewels.

“Are those rhinestones?” someone asks.

“I got a bedazzled trash-picker!” Rawlings-Blake exclaims. “I’m so excited I don’t know what to do with it.”

A holiday-red Starbucks coffee cup in one hand and the bling-encrusted trash-picker in the other, the mayor is shown walking through this bleak West Baltimore neighborhood, picking up a piece of plastic and dropping it in a trash bag.