It’s been about 25 years since the Inner Harbor Pratt Street area has been revitalized — so naturally it’s time to get out our tools and give the area a $100 million face-lift.
OK, OK, so the McKeldin Fountain, played in by hundreds of children trying to beat the heat every summer, is kind of ugly in a fascinating sort of concrete-waterfall way. And maybe the bridges over Light and Pratt streets are frighteningly open-air and not very well-used. And of course it’s impossible to ride a bike down Pratt Street and stay alive long enough to tell the tale.
Maybe the area really does need a face-lift.
But when we revitalize an area, shouldn’t it stay revitalized for a while?
Loyola College professor of economics Stephen Walters had the same question recently.
“I’m a little suspicious as to why we didn’t do it better and correctly the first time,” he said.
Forget that; how are we sure they’re not going to stick us with something that’s going to be torn down in another couple of years?
“When these things were installed, we had lots of favorable press about how wonderful they were and how they were going to put a nice face on the downtown area and the harbor area,” Walters said.
That sounds suspiciously familiar.
If the city wants to build it, it needs public input. It needs to make its sources of funding completely open.
“When you go shopping, you have an idea of how much you can spend,” Walters said. “You should decide how much you can afford to spend by taking inventory of your finances and going from there.”
If they want to rebuild the area, fine. It’s outdated. We get that. But build something that will last and find the money to build it before you get started. And once we’ve built something, we should be able to move on to another area.
Here’s our advice to builders: If you want to build something downtown, take a leaf out of Camden Yards’ book. Make the construction blend in to its Baltimore surroundings. No more funky Brutalist architecture. Nothing that’s going to be dated in a couple of years. We’re talking red brick here. We’re thinking a building that just screams out “Baltimore!” Instead of showing tourists cutting-edge architecture that’ll be out of style in a couple of years (1980s-style fountain, anyone?) let’s show them what we Baltimoreans are really about. We’re about our history, we’re about our industry.
