In his 10th year leading the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore and cheerleading for Baltimore City, Kirby Fowler is ready to turn up the heat on Downtown's untapped sources of potential. (He'll have Downtown in peak physical condition for beach season.)
1) Make Lexington Market & Howard Street Vibrant
He calls Lexington Market underutilized and says it can do more to bring in tourists searching for that authentic Maryland crab. (We'll go do exhaustive, delicious research and report back.) Then there are the vacancies on the once-vibrant Howard Street corridor. "There must be a quick and creative process" for turning things around, he says.
2) Continue The Commercial Comeback
Source: Downtown Partnership of Baltimore
Downtown Baltimore has too much going in its favor not to, Kirby tells us. The office market has shown mixed results, but the country's recovery has been slow, while central Baltimore is outperforming such markets as Chicago and Atlanta. (Now if we could only outperform the Bears on the football field.) Downtown's one-mile radius makes up less than 4% of the city's area but accounts for 13% of its property tax revenue and a quarter of its income tax base.
3) Give People A Place To Live
"I don't think the rest of the region understands the attraction of residents to Downtown," Kirby says. The area is No. 8 in the country for residential density, something many are still shocked to learn, he says. A Downtown that was once dominated by a 9-to-5 office culture now hums with activity into the night; look at Pratt Street's transformation to mixed-use (as in the above rendering of 400 E Pratt's new look). The number of office workers who commute in from the 'burbs is increasingly offset by Downtown residents who commute out. (So now there's traffic going both ways, but you can't win 'em all.) And while institutions kept up development throughout the recession (more students live nearby at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, University of Baltimore, and Maryland College Institute of Art), private developers are now rising to the occasion, Kirby says.
4) Sit Back & Watch
He's bullish about the creative adaptation of the city's built environment to suit the new economy, even though its impact isn't immediately apparent. "When people pass a construction site where a new building is going up, they understand that to be progress. But when older buildings get converted to new uses, the progress is less visible." The classic Bromo-Seltzer Tower (above) is the linchpin for a newly designated arts district. Not to be outdone, the iconic Bank of America office building at 10 Light St will be the biggest project of its kind in Baltimore when it transforms into 480 apartments. As pedestrian traffic increases "the economic gains from these projects becomes much more obvious," Kirby says. And it doesn't hurt that Baltimore theater groups like the Chesapeake Shakespeare Co are improving their digs and generating more revenue from them.
