Tonight Baltimoreans can pause for an hour to puff out their chests. Maryland Public Television will air “Global Harbors: A Waterfront Renaissance,” the story of a defeated city of Baltimore transforming rotting warehouses and piers empty of all signs of life to an Inner Harbor attracting 13 million visitors a year from every corner of the planet.We already know how Harborplace helped bring the city back to life — and, not to be minimized, now generates an estimated $60 million a year in tax revenues. But the documentary reminds us of lost details, including the sheer idealism and courage and foresight of those who championed its development, and those who fought it, mostly out of fear of the sheer unknown.
What most of us didn’t know — but learn from the documentary — is the profound effect Harborplace has had on urban harbors around the world, with municipal leaders having taken their cues from the Baltimore model.
The details are all there, right down to William Donald Schaefer’s famous dip in the seal pool in a full-body bathing suit and a straw hat to inaugurate the National Aquarium. Schaefer’s dip was the good-natured iconic image for a town learning to cast off its famously long-held inferiority complex.
The documentary’s also a chance to ponder all those things that drew strength from that initial boldness. Without Harborplace, and the near-simultaneous fights for the hugely successful aquarium and the Maryland Science Center, you probably don’t have most of what followed.
You don’t have the nearby baseball and football parks, and the Sports Legends Museum and surrounding hotels. You don’t have the high-end new housing along the harbor’s south and west sides. You don’t have Inner Harbor East, with the mix of commercial and home development. You don’t have the marvelous African-American Museum. You don’t have the rebirth of the west side of downtown and the Hippodrome Theater. You don’t have the blossoming of all those waterfront neighborhoods that drew their energy from the success, and the fanfare, and the ever-constant crowds around the Inner Harbor.
And you don’t have a generation of Baltimoreans, who had grown frightened of those areas after dark, slowly making their way back downtown, and seeing the changes, and seeing all those new faces, who couldn’t believe the new life and energy right before their eyes.
“Global Harbors,” four years in the making, got its start with a phone call from Priscilla Carroll to Cari Stein. Carroll is general counsel for the developer Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse and a member of the Urban Land Institute. Stein, creator of a company called Ivy Media, is a freelance producer formerly with a few local TV stations. Ivy Media produced the documentary.
“Priscilla told me, ‘We need to take this story and do something with it,’ ” Stein recalls. “Then she mentioned Martin Millspaugh.”
Millspaugh was there at the beginning of everything. As president and chief executive of Charles Center Inner Harbor Management, he oversaw the rebuilding of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor. He’s still selling the Inner Harbor idea to out-of-towners, and he’s in the documentary, offering a then-and-now perspective to bring a twinkle to the eye.
As does attorney Susan Leviton, describing how she bought one of the dilapidated one-dollar Otterbein homes when rehabbing near the Inner Harbor was considered a roll of the dice.
“I told my mother I bought one of the dollar houses,” says Leviton. “She said, ‘You paid 50 cents too much.’ ”
It was a time, she notes, when people “bragged” that they hadn’t been downtown in 10 years.
Jay Brodie, who became housing commissioner after Robert Embry, appears, too. It was Embry who was the driving force for so much of that era’s rebirth, and Brodie who helped keep it going.
Before the transformation, Brodie says, what he remembers mainly of the Inner Harbor is “the stench of fish.”
And there’s Sandy Hillman, who worked out of Embry’s office and later became a kind of chief cheerleader for downtown, remembering Harborplace’s opening as if “somebody turned the lights on.”
Just as Baltimoreans of a certain generation took a “can’t do” attitude toward city projects, some of us have learned to take the Inner Harbor for granted. “Global Harbors” reminds us why we shouldn’t. It’s not only rejuvenated Baltimore, but served as a model for cities in Europe, Asia and Australia.
The documentary’s a delight. It doesn’t ignore the town’s ongoing troubles, but it’s a measure of how far Baltimore has come, and what a long shot it seemed not so long ago.
