Mount Vernon's institutional leaders have outlined a legislative agenda aimed at restoring the Baltimore neighborhood's vitality, with plans for new lighting, sidewalks, informational kiosks and other tourist-friendly improvements to area streets.
"We'll be at Annapolis next year with an articulated plan for the neighborhood and a bill for new lamping," said Gary Vikan, director of Walters Art Gallery. "New streetscapes are right at the top."
Late last week, Vikan and his counterparts endorsed consultants' concepts -- aimed at making area streets more attractive and complementary to churches, schools, retail shops, arts institutions and residences. They hope to put the area on tourists' agendas while making Mount Vernon a better place for its full-time residents.
"Over the long haul, you cannot separate the prosperity of the cultural destinations from the health of the neighborhood," said Vikan.
On Thursday, the heads of Mount Vernon's institutions were enthusiastic after a briefing by Design Collective, a Pratt Street architectural firm that has been analyzing the area roughly bounded by Read, Calvert, Mulberry and Cathedral streets.
Designers told the group that area streets should be made more attractive to pedestrians. One early target is Centre Street, which passes Walters Art Gallery and the Peabody Institute.
"We've been trying to think outside the box," said Peabody Institute President Robert Sirota, who wants to make his campus more welcoming to walkers.
Sirota said the Peabody, assisted by a $150,000 Abell Foundation grant, is expanding its campus across its traditional Centre Street southern boundary. The school will move the campus book and music store and open a piano sales showroom in the first block of E. Centre St. in two historic buildings at Lovegrove Alley. The music school has renovated two rowhouses in the block for offices.
"There's been a recognition here that we can be very successful and still fail if the neighborhood around us is disintegrating," Sirota said.
Other Centre Street improvements include the reconstruction of a 1960s apartment house at Park Avenue. It will be complete this spring.
Across the street, the Maryland Historical Society has installed the RCA Victor trademark Nipper atop the former Greyhound bus terminal garage and has added several historic Baltimore neon signs -- the Jimmy Woo's restaurant and a sprinting Greyhound dog -- to its building.
Walters is conducting an $18 million renovation of its 1974 building, which will bring a four-story glass entrance tower to Centre Street.
Plans also call for boosting the housing stock -- and perhaps supplying financial incentives to renovate the community's 19th-century rowhouses.
"[Mount Vernon] has offices, apartments, retail shops and cultural institutions in one place," said Rich Burns, another Design Collective architect. "There's clearly a demand for good housing there, but some of the properties are in bad shape."
Ted Pearson of the Mount Vernon-Belvedere Association, said the long-established neighborhood group has worked to correct housing code violations for years. "We have a lot of landlords who are using these buildings as cash cows," he said.