The two men who hope to team up on a new convention hotel in downtown Baltimore know how to build things.
Robert L. Johnson, 56, borrowed $15,000 in 1979 to start Black Entertainment Television and created an empire that he sold to Viacom for nearly $3 billion. Now he is pushing hard to bring major-league baseball back to Washington, despite opposition from Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos.
Robert M. Gladstone, 73, chairs Washington-based Quadrangle Development Corp., which over three decades has built or bought 38 apartments, offices and hotels, totaling more than 11 million square feet.
Neither is a stranger to Baltimore.
Johnson's company, RLJ Development, acquired the Courtyard by Marriott-Inner Harbor last year for $26 million.
"Baltimore is a wonderful city," he said at the time, "and the Inner Harbor East is a particularly dynamic area."
Gladstone's firm is expected to move ahead soon with construction on an apartment building at Howard and Lombard streets, blocks from the proposed hotel site by the Baltimore Convention Center.
Details of the hotel plan were sketchy last night, but city officials are clearly impressed by the pair. Mayor Martin O'Malley has scheduled a morning news conference at City Hall to announce the unsolicited bid.
Johnson and Gladstone, who have varied business careers, are described as energetic, ambitious and successful.
"I don't want to sound like a member of his fan club, but my experience with [Gladstone] is that he's certainly a good addition to the Baltimore development community," said his friend Thomas Bozzuto, a Greenbelt-based developer. "He truly is a guy who if he shakes your hand, you have a deal and don't need a dozen lawyers. He's a good man. He is a man of substance and capability."
Gladstone regularly takes 40-mile bike rides and spends vacations on the go rather than by the pool, Bozzuto said.
While most of Quadrangle's projects have been outside the hotel field, the firm has been involved in two major Washington hotels, the 956-room Grand Hyatt at Washington Center and the 774-room J.W. Marriott at National Place.
On the Eastern Shore, the company serves as development manager of the 400-room Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Resort in Cambridge - a project that has faced major delays and cost overruns. The contractor, Clark Enterprises of Bethesda, sued the Maryland Economic Development Corp., the quasi-public state entity brought in to own and finance the resort, but a settlement was reached before it opened at the end of August.
Quadrangle has planned for years to develop Market Center West apartments at Howard and Lombard. Construction is expected to start within months.
"I would take it as a sign of their bullishness on Baltimore, and downtown Baltimore and the west side," said Ronald M. Kreitner, executive director of WestSide Renaissance Inc., a business group formed to promote the area.
Johnson, named by Ebony magazine as one of the 10 most powerful African-Americans in television, has been called a soft-spoken and regal entrepreneur.
In 2000, before purchasing the Inner Harbor Courtyard, he bought seven extended-stay hotels run by Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Hilton Hotels Corp., the company that would manage the convention hotel.
Recently he made a bid to start a new airline called DC Air. The plan fizzled when a merger between US Airways and United Airlines fell apart.
Johnson has come a long way from his birthplace of Hickory, Miss. The ninth of 10 children, he did menial jobs - scrubbing toilets, for example - before attending the University of Illinois. He earned a master's degree at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
After dabbling in politics, he entered the cable television field and soon launched his pioneering network.