Back when Baltimore had a working waterfront, full of rotting piers and rusty barges, hardly anyone sat around admiring the harbor view.
Now that's all the newcomers want to do - from atop roof decks cobbled in Canton, Federal Hill and elsewhere at a rate approaching one a day.
Two and three stories above street level, there's a building boom in Baltimore, one that has come at great expense to homeowners, required both the newest and crudest construction techniques, raised some safety concerns, boosted property values, horrified historical preservationists, and confounded neighborhood old-timers who can't fathom why anyone would entertain on a baking-hot rowhouse roof.
"The amount of money they cost, they could rent a hall three or four times a year - with air conditioning," said Jim Flanagan, 60, a retired brewery worker who laughs and shakes his head as he counts seven decks in sight of his Elliott Street home in Canton.
But feting friends at a VFW hall doesn't have much appeal for the young professionals willing to shell out $5,000, $10,000 and up for a little patch of pressure-treated heaven. They want to soak up the Inner Harbor sights: the water, the funky Domino Sugars sign, the downtown skyline, the Fourth of July fireworks.
"I would not buy a house without one, not in the city," said Rita Harty, 31, a physician's assistant at Johns Hopkins Hospital who lives in Federal Hill and loves the harbor view from her deck. "I think I'd forgo parking first."
Going strong for the past five or six years with no sign of slacking, the rooftop rage reflects more than the city's changed relationship to its waterfront. It also marks a shift in how some Baltimoreans spend time outdoors - not on their marble front steps, chewing the fat with neighbors, but in the relative isolation of private rooftop retreats.
"It's the new generation putting their signatures on the townhouses," said Steve Strohecker, a real estate broker who figures the decks add $10,000 to $15,000 in value to what used to be called "rowhouses."
"We're moving the outdoor entertainment upstairs where people can enjoy the city skyline, the harbor," he said. "It's just a whole new area of the house to explore."
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Preservationists say the decks look like something that should stick out the back side of a beach house - not crown century-old buildings on cobblestone streets.
"They're inappropriate for the historic district and are really damaging to the character that we're trying to develop down here," said Romaine Somerville, development director for the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill and Fell's Point. She said the decks are not supposed to be visible from the street in historic areas, but many are.
"The economy is based on people coming down here to visit a historic community," she said. "So in the long term, it's very detrimental to this community to lose this rare 18th-, 19th-century ambiance."
John Cole, superintendent of building inspections for the city, has heard plenty from preservationists since deck building took off.
After a deck trimmed in red lights popped up in the 2000 block of Aliceanna Street a year or two ago, Somerville started photographing area decks and checking with the city to make sure each one had a permit.
Rooftop decks are no more likely than additions or any other large home-improvement project to be built without proper permits, Cole said. In fact, he said, it's harder to build a deck on the sly because they are so visible. He said the city catches an illicit deck going up about once or twice a month.
Cole estimates there are 2,000 to 2,500 roof decks in Baltimore - 95 percent of them in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Canton, Federal Hill, Fells Point and Washington Hill. There are many more on the way. The city issues as many as 300 building permits for roof decks a year.
Rooftop decks aren't something your average This Old House viewers can tackle on their own. Rather they are mini-marvels of engineering, a challenge to even the most seasoned construction crew.
"A rooftop deck is very difficult from a logistical point of view," said Dave Lombardo, owner of American Deck Inc. in Overlea, which builds several a year.
One of the biggest problems is getting the lumber from street level up to the roof, Lombardo said. That's no easy task in areas where narrow alleyways and overhead wires can preclude the use of modern boom trucks.
At times, he said, crews resort to an old-fashioned rope-and-pulley system hoisting 200 to 300 pieces of wood - one by one, by hand - 30 to 40 feet to the roof.
Residents do not need their neighbors' approval to build a roof deck, but the city requires that they be notified. That's because in most cases, the decks rest on 8-inch brick "party" walls - so named because they belong jointly to adjacent homeowners - that poke out of the roofs.
Before the city will issue a permit, an engineer or architect must certify that those walls can handle the load, at least 60 pounds per square foot.
"You're relying on old mortar and brick to support a very heavy structure," Lombardo said. If the walls are deemed too weak, the builder has to install 6-by-6-inch supports that run from the basement clear up through the roof.
All those extra challenges add up. A rooftop deck takes two or three times as long to build and costs twice as much as the ordinary backyard variety.
"You can spend $15,000 on a rooftop deck without blinking," Lombardo said.
Even after all that trouble and expense, the work is not over. Rooftop decks require extra maintenance because they are exposed to so much sun and wind.
New, composite materials that last longer than wood are coming into use. But pressure-treated wood remains the most popular choice, and that should be cleaned and sealed every year, Lombardo said.
Whether deck owners are doing that kind of maintenance is anybody's guess.
The city inspects construction upon completion but it's up to homeowners to make sure the decks stay in good shape. Both city officials and contractors express some concern about safety, particularly as the decks age.
"Some are getting five, six years on them now," said Cole, the building inspections superintendent. "That's one of the things - it's on the roof, you don't see it, you don't think to put Thompson's Water Seal on it."
Said Lombardo: "If it falls, it's not falling 2 feet. It's falling 30."
But worries like those seem to slip away with the setting sun when you're relaxing on a roof on a beautiful summer evening.
Harty, the Federal Hill resident, almost forgets she's in a city when she's up there.
"I was kind of thinking I would hate the city. You're surrounded by brick and concrete all day, even in your back yard," said Harty, who was raised in a New Jersey suburb. "You get up there and you're not there in the concrete any more."
Several blocks away, Sarah Cole (no relation to the city official) and Jonathan Steinberg watched ships sail in and out of the harbor from atop their Webster Street rowhouse last Friday night. The breeze was balmy and the view magnificent, enough to make a bowl of chips and dip more appetizing than eating out.
"Friends of ours wanted us to meet them for dinner and we said, 'You can come up here,'" Cole, 32, a Legg Mason trainer, said with a laugh.
Steinberg, 29, a lawyer, was busy hanging a sign meant to bring a bit of old Baltimore to the couple's new city perch.
Carved in wood, it reads: "Welcome, Hon."