Nine years after his death, Harry Weinberg still maintains a powerful grip on downtown Baltimore.
Over the next two weeks, the City Council is expected to approve a bill condemning 127 downtown properties as part of a renewal project that city leaders say will rival the Inner Harbor. For shop owners set to lose their properties, the cruel irony of the plan is that it is being initiated by the billion-dollar charitable foundation Weinberg left behind.
Many have held their businesses long enough to remember 30 years back when "Honolulu Harry" was a dominant force in Baltimore's downtown. City officials blamed Weinberg for dragging down property values by obstinately refusing repeated pleas to improve his 47 downtown buildings.
"The Weinberg real estate tactics have led to the deterioration of downtown," said Kelley Brohawn, a downtown commercial Realtor aiding merchants opposing the plan. "Harry Weinberg and the Weinberg Foundation are considered by many to be the worst commercial landlords in the city."
For city economic development officials, the past has little to do with the present. Today, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation holds $1.2 billion in assets and is the largest charitable group in the state, funding causes from homeless shelters to hospitals.
Whether to support a plan offered by a private group willing to dedicate up to $150 million of its money to spark a downtown resurgence is an easy decision for city officials.
"It's not fair to point at any property owner," said Baltimore Development Corp. President M. J. "Jay" Brodie, who served as city housing commissioner under former Mayor William Donald Schaefer during Weinberg's downtown reign. "Whatever people's view of history, the Weinbergs are interested in helping us to move forward and that is very positive."
Merchants whose futures are threatened by the redevelopment have a hard time ignoring the Weinberg history. An Austrian immigrant, Weinberg operated from a no-nonsense business strategy: "God isn't making any more land, so grab what you can and hold on to it."
By the time of his death at 82, Weinberg held key downtown properties that included the intersection of Howard and Lexington streets, once the heart of Baltimore because of the four department stores that filled its corners: Hecht's, Hutzler's, Stewart's and Hochschild Kohn.
Weinberg's family moved to South Baltimore in 1908 when he was 4. He never finished sixth grade because of constant schoolyard fights and spoke fractured English that even aides had a hard time understanding. Yet Weinberg had the Midas touch.
He started selling newspapers as a kid on Howard Street before the Depression. He later worked -- as did his four siblings -- at his father's automobile and fender repair shop near Camden Station. His first major business transaction came at 23, setting the pace for what would become a billion-dollar stock and land empire.
Seeing the exodus of city residents to the suburbs beginning in the late 1950s, Weinberg began collecting west-side downtown properties from Cathedral Street west to what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard, and from Monument Street to South Pratt Street. He purchased entire square blocks, including the old Stewart's department store building, which he bought in 1979 for $1 million in cash.
On the street where he once sold newspapers, he became the largest property owner.
Weinberg then sat on his properties. Through all the downtown renewal efforts, ranging from the Market Center Urban Renewal area in the 1970s to the creation of the Howard Street transit mall, frustrated city officials failed to budge Weinberg.
Even the dynamic Schaefer, credited with reinvigorating the city with the Inner Harbor, was unable to convince Weinberg to fix his properties, which served as a $50 million annual tax write-off. Schaefer told the downtown property king that the window to extend Inner Harbor prosperity through the center of downtown would not last long.
"Honolulu Harry Holds Up The Works," a 1985 headline from the old News American newspaper read.
"He was a very tough businessman," said Schaefer, who was elected Maryland's comptroller in November. "If he didn't see a profit in it, he didn't do it."
Weinberg viewed improving the properties as a waste of money because city residents were still flocking to the suburbs and the city was unwilling to help him line up tenants for the buildings. The public good, Weinberg once said, was the government's job.
"We tried," Schaefer said. "We found tenants for Hutzler's but we just couldn't find anyone for the Stewart's building."
In 1989, Forbes magazine listed Weinberg as the 70th richest man in America, referring to him as "combative, aggressive, litigious."
When he died, Weinberg shocked the city by leaving his $1 billion empire to the poor and elderly. The charitable foundation he quietly established with his wife, Jeanette, in 1957 instantly became the largest in the state and 12th in the nation.
For all his shrewdness, bluster and business bite, Weinberg showed an unmatched kindness for the poor. Friends said the feeling stretched back to his days as a kid paying 30 cents for soap and towels in South Baltimore.
Every year since Weinberg's death, the foundation has spent $35 million, mostly on the poor and elderly, including $12 million in Maryland. "He understood the agony of the poor," foundation attorney Shale Stiller said upon Weinberg's death.
Bernard Siegel, Weinberg's trusted, longtime accountant, became a foundation trustee. The stock market surge has made the foundation's assets flush in recent years. But Siegel quickly became aware that the agency's properties were reaching rock bottom. The property values have plummeted about 80 percent in the past 30 years, with rents as high as $45 a square foot dropping to as low as $10.
Three years ago, foundation leaders met with the Baltimore Development Corp. to discuss the problem. Weinberg trustees arrived from Honolulu, proposing low-rent office and storage space. Siegel thought bigger, igniting the idea of reviving the entire west-side neighborhood.
The foundation invited other downtown leaders to join the planning process, including Baltimore Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos and leaders from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, which has spent $500 million expanding its campus in the last 20 years.
With such private investment muscle by its side, the Weinberg foundation hired designers to study the west side, creating a master plan in June.
The proposal includes creating more than 2,000 apartments and up to 70,000 square feet of street-level retail shops to create a 24-hour upscale city-within-a-city.
The group presented the plan to Schmoke, who embraced it, viewing it as his legacy to downtown. The mayor pledged $28 million in tax dollars to be used to improve the downtown infrastructure and purchase the condemned properties.
For the past nine months, foundation officials have listened to the criticism of shop owners accusing Weinberg of allowing his properties to deteriorate. Yet Siegel sees no inconsistencies with the foundation leading the renovation plans.
"We said from the start that it had to be a partnership," Siegel said.
Two orders that Weinberg included in the foundation was that no money would go to the black-tie arts and culture crowd. And properties could only be sold or leased for a "compelling reason." Siegel believes that time has arrived.
"This area has lost its identity," he said shortly after unveiling the project. "This is our last, best chance."
Likewise, Schaefer supports the redevelopment plan, noting that Weinberg is not the only one to blame.
"He wasn't the only one that let it go to pot," Schaefer said of Weinberg. "The city let it go. They let it go because they didn't feel that it had a future."
Yet the historical twist nags shop owners such as Gene Petasky, who faces losing his Metro Broker Ltd. pawnshop and jewelry store, which he has operated at 4 N. Eutaw St. for a quarter-century. Petasky holds no animosity to Weinberg, who grew up on the same block as Petasky's father, Sam. But he wonders whether Weinberg would have supported the move.
"The worst thing you can do under Jewish law is to take a man's business, and the best thing you can do is teach him a business," Petasky said. "If Harry was here, I don't know that he would allow the people of the foundation to displace business people."
Petasky will be the third generation in his family to have his business condemned by the city. His father, Sam, lost his bar at 10 Market Center in the 1970s for The Brokerage development. The site still sits vacant. His grandfather, Benjamin, once ran an Army-Navy store that is now the site of the Baltimore Police Department.
In October, Petasky's father died and was buried at the Hebrew Friendship Cemetery on East Baltimore Street, right across from Harry Weinberg. During a recent visit to his father's grave, Petasky stood in front of Weinberg's monument, marveling at the turn of downtown events.
"He was a very powerful man," Petasky said.
Pub Date: 4/11/99