Pardon me if I sound a little shocked: I had not been to Port Covington – excuse me, Baltimore Peninsula – since my former employer, The Baltimore Sun, moved us out of there and squeezed the news operation into a smaller space downtown.

That was in late 2022. Our stay at Sun Park in a bright, modern newsroom inside the huge printing plant had only lasted a couple of years before the pandemic sent Sun reporters and editors to our laptops at home.

We returned to Sun Park only briefly before the move back downtown, a few blocks south of the paper’s former longtime home at 501 North Calvert Street.

Port Covington – sorry, Baltimore Peninsula, thanks to corporate re-branding — was slated to become a whole new city-within-a-city, once envisioned with skyscrapers as “Dubai on the Patapsco” by the Under Armour CEO, Kevin Plank. Toward this end, Plank had purchased, among other properties, the Sun’s printing plant. That was in 2014. Eight years later, the lease was up. It was time to go.

My parting image of Sun Park was a smoldering heap of torch-cut steel outside the printing plant, the sad, mangled remains of the big, beautiful presses that had produced the paper at Port Covington – pardon me, Baltimore Peninsula – for three decades.

The presses could once print 75,000 copies of The Sun in an hour, but they were no longer needed because the company outsourced printing to some outfit in Wilmington.

So we could be talking about two years since my last visit to the waterfront area on the south side of the city.

Big Ask, Big Promise

The shock came a couple of weeks ago seeing the proliferation of buildings at Baltimore Peninsula – not just in the central area near where the Sun plant once stood, but across Cromwell Street, in the area known as Locke Landing, where 800 townhomes and apartments are under construction by a fellow developer, Mark Sapperstein.

Buildings on new streets run from Cromwell as far as the eye can see, down to the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River.

It was jarring to see this finally happening after the initial controversy over the extent of public financing for the development, the change in its brand and scale (there are no skyscrapers), the ups-and-downs of Under Armour and the pandemic.

The ask by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank’s company, Sagamore Development, had been unprecedented:

A $660 million (TIF) Tax Increment Financing package to transform a swath of industrial land he had purchased into a mixed-use waterfront community.

Port Covington was to be a glittering city-within-the-city, replete with towering buildings, kayaks, families and tens of thousands of jobs for a struggling city.

In March, a video entitled “Baltimore’s Billion Dollar Ghost Town” appeared on YouTube suggesting nearly a decade later that the promises remained unfulfilled. The nearly 12-minute film provided a walk-through of the mostly completed central development, asking, “Where are all the people?”

The video has had 1.6 million views.

ABOVE: “Baltimore’s Billion Dollar Ghost Town” video went viral. BELOW: The pedestrian walkway at Rye House, between Mission Boulevard and East Cromwell Street, was very quiet on my visit. (YouTube, Dan Rodricks)

Jersey Mike’s, Slutty Vegan

When I asked about this in April, a public relations executive for Baltimore Peninsula said the video had been shot in 2024, that “hundreds of residents” had since moved in, that “thousands of visitors and tourists” had been drawn to the neighborhood for events and that “a slew of new retailers” would soon be opening.

When I pressed for more information, Eve Jalinoos, of BerlinRosen public relations, offered these specifics:

● Two residential buildings, 250 Mission and Rye House, were 95% leased.

● Some 100,000 square feet of retail space would be fully leased and open by 2026, with nearly 30% of the businesses minority and/or women-owned.

● New eateries had opened: Ben & Jerry’s, Jersey Mike’s and Pinky Cole’s Slutty Vegan and Bar Vegan. (They joined establishments already in place: the Rye Street Tavern, Vessel, a cocktail bar, and Little Wing, a coffee shop and store, the latter two at the ROOST Baltimore hotel.)

● Club Volo has been operating at Baltimore Peninsula since 2023, offering intramural sports leagues for kickball, soccer and pickleball. (Its August events included “solo cornhole speed dating” and “pajama bump out volleyball night.”)

● CFG Bank occupies the primary office building facing Cromwell Street and, across the way, Under Armour’s new world headquarters. (The front of it suggested to me a dirigible moored among trees.)

“Office leasing at Baltimore Peninsula is progressing steadily, with 40% of the space already leased and demand now outpacing availability, as prospects are competing on deals for remaining space,” Jalinoos wrote in an email.

“Nearly 100% of the total office space is accounted for through leases, live deals or ongoing negotiations.”

“Office leasing at Baltimore Peninsula is progressing steadily, with 40% of the space already leased”  – Eve Jalinoos, Baltimore Peninsula.

I contacted Jalinoos recently. She gave a further update:

“Baltimore Peninsula has delivered over 1.2 million square feet of new residential and office space across five buildings, including 376 fully leased apartments [at 250 Mission and Rye House] with 20% being affordable housing.”

Over the spring and summer, she said, leases for nearly 65,000 square feet went to firms moving over from their present city locations to the Peninsula:

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), the University of Maryland Smith School of Business’ satellite campus, Newmark, the commercial real estate advisory, and the award-winning architectural firm Ayers Saint Gross. Molly’s Dog Care opened in May, the Daily Grind in June.

Coming in the months ahead, says Jalinoos, are an M&T Bank branch; The Learning Care Group, a child care and early learning center; a CFG Bank branch; Live-K Karaoke; Urbano Tex-Mex restaurant; Inspire Nail Bar; Slurp Noodle Bar; Blü Cā, a Jamaican restaurant; and Shinkansen Sushi.

Jalinoos says more than 2,000 people work at Baltimore Peninsula and more than 500 families now live there.

Hello! Is Anybody Home?

I walked around the place on a recent Friday afternoon, still a bit shocked at it all.

What I didn’t see was a lot of people on the streets and in the courtyards. The place felt like a neighborhood waiting to happen.

But a man walking his dog assured me that the apartments in his building, 250 Mission, indeed had tenants.

There’s still space for more development.

A few weeks ago, some industry news sources reported that data centers are being considered for the Peninsula. And Kevin Lynch of SouthBmore.com reported that the Maryland Stadium Authority has studied the long-discussed idea of a soccer stadium at the open site where The Baltimore Sun building once stood.

That seems like a long time ago already.

Below a few more shots from my visit: