On the day Harborplace opened 30 years ago, I never imagined that I'd soon be buying a small sofa there, a set of dishes and some small kitchen appliances, too. As a nondriving city dweller, I bargained with a cabdriver to get all the stuff in his trunk and up Calvert Street to Charles Village.
Three decades later, the pavilions rarely attract me. Another Baltimore has prospered around them, but I still respect the effect they had when they were the new kids on the block.
That opening ceremony at Harborplace was one well-orchestrated publicity event. As a news reporter, I received an invitation that sent me to a pier somewhere near Dundalk. I boarded a ship — could it have been the old Pride of Baltimore? — and met up with Broadway star Richard Kiley, who created the role of Don Quixote in the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha and sang the hit song, "The Impossible Dream." In the 1950s, he had sung "Stranger in Paradise" in Kismet.
The weather for the opening was perfect. An enormous crowd filled Pratt and Light streets.
For the occasion, Kiley was assigned "The Star-Spangled Banner," performed with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He sounded wonderful as his powerful voice boomed over the Patapsco.
As he sang on an outdoor stage that night, I had dinner in a Harborplace restaurant with some friends who had bought a house for a token dollar in Barre Circle. They were typical of the people who were just beginning to trickle back into the city's older neighborhoods. Added to the mix, James Rouse had recently made the cover of Time magazine. The night ended with more music and fireworks.
That 1980 night seemed to say that Baltimore had turned an enormous corner. We had dealt with the wrenching ordeal of the 1968 riots and another decade of hard work on Baltimore's part to pull itself back together. The city was clearly beginning to reinvent itself. It had found a confidence. For people who were scared to come downtown, or thought there was nothing to do there, the place became a destination.
Harborplace brought so many people downtown that adjacent neighborhoods caught the same spirit. There was a spillover boost in the city's spirits that stretched from the Hollins Market in Southwest Baltimore across to Fells Point and south to Federal Hill.
Like so many other skeptical Baltimoreans, I did not know if I would take to the type of retail goods that was being offered that day 30 years ago. Would Harborplace be like Rouse's other projects, as controlled and precious as the Village of Cross Keys or as new-world as Columbia?
But I was an immediate convert when I saw all the hard work and consideration that had been focused on the place. And, as I soon discovered, you could actually buy some things you needed, like the housewares I piled in that cab.
I liked the idea that you could buy five pounds of boiling potatoes, steaks, scrapple and eggs at the grocery shops that were part of the original Harborplace concept. I was startled when the butcher there told me he sold about five pounds of honeycomb tripe a week. That convinced me that Harborplace would work out well.
The tripe and the ground beef at the grocery stores disappeared in the next few years. Many of the small businesses also left. The chain restaurants arrived, as did some large retailers. Harborplace prospered as the symbol of Baltimore, as a visitors' port of call. As tourists discovered Baltimore, Harborplace became more their destination than mine. Like so many Baltimoreans, I haven't had dinner there in years.