Long before Baltimore had its Harborplace pavilions, or the National Aquarium, or Oriole Park, there was Charles Center.
The 33-acre district in the heart of downtown might not be as well known as some of the newer spots, and tourists don't typically seek it out. But it is as significant as any other development associated with modern-day Baltimore because, in many ways, it was the catalyst for all that followed, including the even more ambitious effort to rejuvenate the Inner Harbor.
The planning of Charles Center also marked the first time that civic leaders attempted to address the signs of suburban flight and economic upheaval that public officials have wrestled with ever since.
This week brings, without fanfare, the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the master plan that guided the development of Charles Center - and, to a large degree, launched the much-vaunted renaissance of downtown Baltimore. It was on March 27, 1958 - 50 years ago tomorrow - that civic leaders first gathered in City Hall to present the plan for Charles Center to Mayor Thomas J. D'Alesandro Jr. during a crowded news conference.
Skeptics said they would never live to see it completed. But during the next three decades, Charles Center was constructed largely as envisioned - with more than a dozen office buildings, three apartment towers, hotels, underground garages, parks and a theater.
"I remember some councilmen saying, 'It can't be done. It won't be done,'" former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer said this week. "But the good councilmen said, 'Yes, it will. It will be done.' And eventually people got behind it - the business community, the residents, even the newspapers got behind it."
Hailed as bold and imaginative when it was first shown, and later criticized by some as producing buildings and public spaces that were more sterile and austere than in older parts of town, the plan nevertheless set the city on a path of revitalization that continues to this day with initiatives on the west side of downtown and the neighborhoods around the Johns Hopkins medical campus in East Baltimore.
Before Charles Center, people traveling between Philadelphia and Washington would routinely bypass Baltimore, Schaefer noted. But because of Charles Center, and the redevelopment that followed, "we've taken a little city where no one wanted to stop and we created a place where people want to come, want to live. ... That was the starting point," said Schaefer, who was a city councilman when the plan was unveiled.
Charles Center was "the beginning of Baltimore's renaissance," said Martin Millspaugh, former chief executive of Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corp.
The plan for Charles Center was unveiled when the city was close to its population peak - it had an all-time high of 949,708 residents in 1950, compared with 651,154 by 2000 - but downtown had begun showing signs of disinvestment.
Businesses were leaving for the counties. Employment was down. No major buildings had been constructed in the central business district for 30 years. Just before Christmas 1954, O'Neill's closed at Charles and Lexington Streets - the first of half a dozen department stores that would eventually leave downtown, the region's premier retail destination before suburban malls and "avenue-style" shopping centers.
Two years before, a blue-ribbon panel called the Commission on Governmental Economy and Efficiency Baltimore published a report on the city's financial plight. It concluded that the city would soon reach a point at which the growth in the assessable tax base through rising values and new development would not match the deterioration in the value and assessment of older properties.
"Unless radical action is taken," the commission warned, "the municipal corporation will be bankrupt within a generation."
That dire warning led to the creation of the Greater Baltimore Committee, a group of civic leaders intent on reversing the decline by harnessing the power of the business community. They formed a planning council to devise ways to increase the tax base by rebuilding the city's core.
The planners decided to focus on a dilapidated commercial area between the city's retail and financial centers. The boundaries were Charles Street on the east, Saratoga Street on the north, Liberty Street and Hopkins Place on the west, and Lombard Street on the south. The area was named Charles Center, after Charles Street. A professional planner on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, David Wallace, was hired to create a master plan to guide construction.
Despite the acknowledgment that change was needed, there was also a reluctance to change, a remnant of the local provincialism observed by the writer Gerald W. Johnson before World War II. "Baltimore is unquestionably the great harker back," he wrote. "Baltimore is becoming a modern city, but gosh, how she dreads it."
Baltimore was a conservative Southern city in many respects. Few national corporations had headquarters in town. There was no guarantee that businesses would spring for expensive works of architecture when a cheaper, plainer product might do. Clients needed assurance that their investment would pay off.
The Charles Center plan provided that. Wallace surveyed other cities' renewal efforts as he formulated his recommendations, but he also respected Baltimore's character. Unlike other large-scale projects, the Charles Center plan did not call for total demolition of the area. It recommended the preservation of several older structures from before World War II, including the B&O; Building, the Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. Building, the Fidelity and Deposit Building and the Lord Baltimore Hotel.
Yet Charles Center also offered a bold vision for the heart of Baltimore, radically different from what was there before. It proposed that individual buildings be mounted on a continuous urban base, with piazzas, overhead walkways and underground garages that could accommodate the movement of people and vehicles on separate levels.
One of the more unusual aspects of Charles Center, according to architect Charles Lamb, a former principal of RTKL Associates, one of the design consultants for the project, was the high percentage of private developers envisioned. "We had private parking garages under public streets and private buildings over public plazas. It is very complicated to build that way. In its time, the plan was unheard of - eons ahead of what other cities were doing."
D'Alesandro hailed it as "a magnificent concept for a new downtown for Baltimore." That November, city voters approved $25 million in bonds to begin acquiring properties, clearing sites and relocating utilities.
Private developers expressed strong interest from the start. For the first major office building, One Charles Center, the city received submissions from groups that offered to hire such world-famous architects as Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The city selected the Mies design, largely because of the luster and recognition that the architect's involvement was expected to bring. One of the losing bidders, Jacob Blaustein, was so miffed that he began building a competing office tower one block away, just outside Charles Center's boundaries. The rivalry showed that the private sector had confidence in the redevelopment plan, and both towers filled up quickly.
Other buildings followed in rapid succession, including the Hamburger's clothing store, the Sun Life Building, the Fallon Federal Office Building and the Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust Co. headquarters. In 1967, the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre opened at Baltimore and Charles streets.
By the early 1980s, the total investment in Charles Center was $180 million - $50 million more than planners projected in 1958.
In recent years, Charles Center has experienced a rebirth of its own. Improvements include Orioles owner Peter Angelos' restoration of Mies' One Charles Center office tower and creation of a new home for the Johns Hopkins University's Downtown Center; David Hillman's conversion of the BG&E; Building to luxury apartments; and the Downtown Partnership's greening of Center Plaza. More changes are inevitable, but Charles Center's role in the city's rebirth is undeniable.
"It kicked off a chain of successful redevelopment initiatives that astonished the community, which had a collective inferiority complex," said Millspaugh, the former Charles Center executive. "The rest is history."
ed.gunts@baltsun.com