TC Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!
What could say that better than a giant crab sculpture in the middle of Rash Field? Or a simulated row of brick houses with marble steps along Light Street? How about miniature replicas of Fort McHenry, the B&O; Railroad Museum and the city markets, right by the waterfront?
Architects and planners have all sorts of ideas for improving Baltimore's famed Inner Harbor shoreline. But they seem to agree on one thing: When it comes right down to it, there really isn't much of Baltimore in the Inner Harbor.
Of the five teams of architects, landscape architects and artists that the Schmoke administration invited to take part in a 10-week design competition to generate ideas for the shoreline, all to one degree or another suggested that what the Inner Harbor really needs is more of a sense of the living, breathing, marble steps-scrubbing Baltimore.
"People can get the wrong impression about Baltimore by coming just to the Inner Harbor," Dennis Carmichael, a landscape architect with EDAW Inc. of northern Virginia, said last month during his presentation to a five-member jury. "If all they remember is Harborplace, the Hyatt and the Convention Center, that's not all Baltimore is."
"The Inner Harbor should be the front door to the city," Martha Schwartz, a landscape architect from Boston, said in her presentation. "It should reflect the cultural and natural history of the place."
History and hype
The competition was held to generate ideas for improving a 20-acre parcel including Rash Field and the west shoreline of the Inner Harbor -- already the city's front yard -- and making it a "major destination" unto itself. The city has tentatively budgeted $7.5 million to carry out an initial phase of work in time for the 200th anniversary of Baltimore's incorporation in 1997.
Winners will be announced later this week. And judging from the recent presentations, deciding exactly how to add that missing sense of the real Baltimore will be an important theme no matter who is tapped to chart a new course for the harborfront.
There can be a fine line, after all, between history and hype, heritage and hokeyness. The trick is figuring out how to acknowledge Baltimore's quirks and foibles -- its "Hon"-ness -- without descending into kitsch.
The five design teams offered a range of approaches to the problem, dividing roughly into two philosophical camps.
On one end of the spectrum were designers who were unabashed about putting more signs of Baltimore around the Inner Harbor. They contend that the modern buildings and open spaces are pleasant enough but don't really give visitors a sense of what the city is all about.
The team headed by Ms. Schwartz and Baltimore native Richard Burns of Design Collective made its point with a series of witty visual vignettes. The most outrageous one was "Blue Crab Park," a crab-shaped bas relief that landscape artists would create by sculpting mounds of earth.
To people passing by at wharf level, the area would look like a series of grassy knolls. But when seen from Federal Hill, the crab would reveal itself.
The same designers proposed that the harborfront be illuminated by lampposts with large translucent blue crabs on top. They designed a "natural history spiral" that would take people from wharf level into the harbor.
They want to re-create rowhouse facades with white marble steps as the enclosure for a 1,200-foot-long "neighborhood walk" that would tell visitors all about city communities. Each part of their plan was intended to remind visitors exactly where they are.
Mr. Carmichael, working with Grieves, Worrall, Wright and O'Hatnick of Baltimore, and local artists Linda DePalma and Paul Daniel, took a similar approach. He recommended that the west shore be turned into a series of exhibits touting Baltimore's heritage in shipping, railroading, industry, architecture and other fields.
As part of the competition, the city wanted each team to designate a location for a visitors center to replace the one at Pratt and Howard Streets. In effect, Mr. Carmichael's group recommended that the entire west shoreline be turned into a visitors center. "When you walk away, you should know more about Baltimore and the bay," he said.
Avoiding provincialism
On the other end of the spectrum were the groups that stopped short of making Baltimore the central theme of their designs.
A joint venture of Schnadelbach Associates and Crozier Associates recommended that the shoreline be transformed into series of lush gardens, with themes such as Earth, Wind, Sun and Water.
Landscape architect George Hargreaves called for the shoreline be a stage set for exhibits that focused on "the interface between man and water."
And James Wines of SITE Inc. proposed the "Harbor Arbor," a living sculpture that would connect all the disparate spaces one now finds along the promenade.
Working with Anshen & Allen of Baltimore, Mr. Wines also recommended construction of an aerial cable car system that would take people from Rash Field to Pier 6 -- enabling them to make a complete loop around the Inner Harbor.
Mr. Wines said that he and his team members steered away from dwelling too heavily on local themes because they thought too much provincialism could work against the city's efforts to market itself globally.
A plan that primarily highlights local lore could "regionalize" the Inner Harbor, he said. "We've tried to internationalize it, because that's what we thought the city wanted. We believe there has to be some conceptual link that pulls everything together. For us, the key was the arbor."
Fact and fantasy
Deciding who's best suited to redesign the harborfront is the jury's job. But even after a designer is selected, the final components of any harbor make-over will merit serious public discussion.
Capturing the sense of a place is a theme that seems to come up more and more often, as planners around the country strive to create new attractions that play off the attributes of old places.
The Disney Development Co., for example, has sparked controversy with its plan to build a history-oriented theme park called America in northern Virginia. Why should anyone visit a theme park about history, critics asked, when there is so much real history to explore all around? And if people do go, the skeptics continue, won't they get a distorted, Disnified version of history?
One is reminded of the youngster whose mother took him to Paris and announced that they were going to visit the Eiffel Tower. "What's the big deal?" he asked. "I've already seen the one at King's Dominion."
Ada Louise Huxtable, the former architecture critic for the New York Times, has spent several years tracking the ever-blurring line between fact and fantasy for a forthcoming book titled "Inventing Reality." She provided a hint of her findings in a 1992 essay for the New York Review of Books.
In that essay, she noted a disturbing shift in the way Americans perceive reality. Led first by the historic preservation movement and then by the phenomenon of "themed entertainment," she contends, Americans have abandoned reality in favor of selective fantasy. A clear example, she says, is the way tourists have embraced the falsity of restored environments such as "historic Williamsburg," which is such a complicated blend of restoration and reproduction in which it's practically impossible to tell what's old and what's not.
"The blend of new and old, real and fake, original and copy, in even the best of these restorations defies analysis; it is dedicated to a wholly artificial construction that is supposed to convey a true (that is, tangible) experience of American art and history," Ms. Huxtable observes. "But if these "re-creations" teach something to those who might otherwise remain innocent of history, they also devalue what they teach; the intrinsic qualities of the real place are transformed and falsified."
The ultimate result, she warns, is the glorification of the unreal over the real -- a world where the "authentic reproduction" is held in the highest regard.
"These are the con words of American culture," she writes. "Authentic reproduction has entered the language and culture as a total up-ending of values and a great money maker for historic restorations, museums and assorted coattail enterprises. What interests me is how far this easy confusion of fact and fantasy has come and how insidiously it has perverted the way we think."
Tough choices
The debate about authenticity and replication comes into play in the planning for Baltimore's Inner Harbor as well. How does one play to the public's expectations of Baltimore, without stooping to one-line jokes? "Welcome to Baltimore, Hon" is a genuine sentiment. But how does one translate that greeting to three dimensions without seeming mawkish or cloying or insincere?
In their competition entries, the five teams demonstrated that there is no shortage of ways to showcase Baltimore and Maryland. But coming up with ideas is just the beginning. Arriving at the proper approach, and striking the right chord with the public, are part of the challenge, too.
Ultimately, the city has to figure out what it wants to say -- and how to say it -- before it can tell the designers what to do.
Edward Gunts covers planning and design issues for The Baltimore Sun.