Something seemed not quite right the other evening while I stood at a Charles Street bus stop.
There were just too many people purposefully moving about on the street at 7:30. Some carried grocery bags. Others were making runs to the wine shop. Some were on bicycles. Flip-flops were the footwear of choice. Charles Street had a steady stream of people — what I've heard called a critical mass, a buzz, a bustle.
It was a good experience, but it nevertheless caught me off guard. The vibrancy that has characterized Federal Hill and Harbor East has finally caught up with Mount Vernon.
It's been precisely 50 years since I began walking through downtown, often along Charles Street. It's a great thoroughfare for a look and a stroll, but there have been depressing stretches of vacancies and empty storefronts. While there are some interesting shops and restaurants that Baltimoreans love, there were disappointments too. There were times in the 1970s when Charles Street at Mount Royal almost became a skid row of liquor outlets.
I had a personal gripe with the demolitions, often in the 1960s, during the era before historic preservation laws took effect. Some of the street's noble 19th-century corner rowhouses fell. Knock down a corner and gain a surface parking lot.
It seemed like the harbor, Fells Point and Canton caught the energy, while Charles Street and Mount Vernon sat there, stalled.
About the same time I experienced the increased pedestrian comfort level along Charles Street, I learned that one of its largest vacant spaces was about to be occupied by a new development. I heard that plans are in the works for a replacement structure at the northwest corner of Charles and Eager streets — opposite the Maryland Club, Hippo and the Grand Central Station bars. The site is part of the Kingdon Gould Jr. parking holdings.
SMG architects Walter Schamu and Charles Patterson showed me their drawings for the low-rise building that will house a new retail corner and some offices above. It could be that in a couple of years, there may be a new anchor restaurant or food market. The Gould family is also considering another building for its surface lot at Charles and Read.
So who or what gets credit? Is it the Peabody's students? MICA, or the four-year program at the University of Baltimore? Is it the renovation of the old Medical Arts Building or the Twelve09 condo, or the careful restoration of places we knew as Gampy's or MacGillivray's? Is it the Circulator, the Bolt Bus or the Johns Hopkins Shuttle? The Fitzgerald? The Lyric? The 100th anniversary of Penn Station?
What else? Could it be the repaving of street and the addition of the brick sidewalks and granite curbing? The Pope John Paul II statue? Have so many enormous rowhouses been renovated throughout Mount Vernon that there is better choice in housing? Sometimes I wonder why, after years of promise, downtown Baltimore has only just become a magnet for younger residents.
I consulted one of the neighborhood's stalwarts, R. Paul Warren, who lives on Park Avenue. "You can feel it," he said. "I've checked census data. Mount Vernon went from 7,300 residents to 8,300 in a decade. The median age is just over 31. It's walkable. It's just a cool place to live."