DRIVING THE CITY
MAYOR SCHAEFER WAS COMPLETELY SERIOUS about building the East-West Expressway, but incompletely successful. Like the two mayors before him, he came to office facing the challenge of constructing a controversial, unfinished highway. The task may have carried more urgency for Schaefer than for either Theodore McKeldin or Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. The city and federal governments had already sunk millions of dollars into planning, condemnation, clearance, and construction. Unless he could sell the highway scheme to his constituents and fellow politicians, the bits and pieces of the road already finished or under construction would become what city finance director Charles Benton called “tombstones”—useless monuments to wasted expenditures.
Less than two weeks after his election in November 1971, Schaefer received a letter from Thomas Perkins III, president of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association. Perkins noted that “the resolution of the current highway dilemma” was perhaps “the most pressing and complex assignment facing your new administration.” But, he added, the CPHA, and especially its transportation committee, were “concerned that there appears to be . . . a significant lack of consensus among government planning officials and consultants with regard to major elements of the proposed highway system.” He suggested that Schaefer stage a public forum at which city officials could present a clear and comprehensive plan for the East-West Expressway that would resolve the confusion and convey to the public “a clear understanding of the design and objectives of the system as a whole.”1
Two months later, a quartet of the mayor’s department heads appeared before the city council and an audience of about 100 citizens to explain the expressway. Planning director Larry Reich traced the long history of the east-west highway, with maps to illustrate the changing outlines of the project. Public works director F. Pierce Lineaweaver and housing commissioner Robert Embry presented the case for the highway as a vital ingredient in the city’s downtown development projects and its economic base.2 But their presentations hinted at a shift in the case for the new expressway.
Finance director Benton delivered the most explicit acknowledgment of this new perspective on the road. The highway’s role in speeding traffic to and around the central business district was still part of the argument, but Benton now emphasized the road’s vital part in keeping Southeast Baltimore’s industries in Baltimore. He was not the first public official to arrive at this view. Mayor D’Alesandro III had become an expressway believer after he heard industry representatives at a board of estimates session complain that transportation problems might compel them to abandon Baltimore for locations with better highway access. Benton’s presentation now made this problem an explicit and official focus of the Schaefer administration’s transportation policy. “Certain large industries,” he warned, “now located in the City have made it perfectly clear that their commitment to remain in the City is contingent on the provision now of adequate transportation facilities of which the Interstate System is the cornerstone.” Baltimore’s mills and factories had once relied on railroads to move their raw materials and finished goods, but trucks and highways had become essential to industry. The city, he promised, would not neglect the transportation needs of commuters and transit riders. Its highways would accommodate the region’s motorists as well as interstate 18-wheelers, and a new rapid transit system would increase mobility for Baltimoreans at large.3
As finance director, of course, Benton’s principal concern was whether the city could afford the proposed expressway, with a total cost of $1.1 billion. He estimated that the federal government would pay for all but $213 million, which would mostly be covered by the state’s issuance of transportation bonds; Baltimore would have to pay back the principal with interest. But Benton assured Baltimoreans “that the entire burden of the Interstate System, as well as all other highways in Baltimore City, is being financed not from the tax on real estate, or any other tax imposed by Baltimore City.” The money would come from Baltimore’s share of the state’s automobile revenues—auto registration and titling fees, together with the proceeds of the state gasoline tax. Benton claimed that by 1978, when the expressway was to be completed, annual debt service on the transportation bonds would be $22.5 million, but the city’s share of the automobile revenues would exceed $50 million.4 Money was not a problem.
Although the CPHA did not oppose the mayor’s new highway system, it challenged Charles Benton’s assurances about the city’s ability to pay for it. Not long after the finance director’s presentation at the public hearing, the CPHA treasurer subjected Benton’s estimates to a searching analysis. Some of Benton’s assumptions were undermined by the rising cost of the highway and increases in interest rates on state transportation bonds. But the organization’s sharpest criticism questioned Benton’s plan to cover the cost of the expressway with the city’s share of automobile revenues. According to the CPHA, this would push other transportation expenses—for building, maintaining, lighting, and cleaning the city’s streets—into the general funds budget and draw on property tax revenues, which Benton had declared sacrosanct.5
Benton had articulated a new, industrial-strength justification for building the East-West Expressway but had also introduced a new problem. The highway project was judged financially feasible after passage of the Federal Highway Act of 1956 because the federal government would underwrite most of its cost. Now the city’s ability to cover even its own relatively small share of the cost was open to question. Soon, members of the Schaefer administration were forced to acknowledge that the city might not have the money to complete the mayor’s expressway plan. By early 1974, for example, they were considering abandonment of the segment through Little Italy, Fell’s Point, and Canton. The route through Fell’s Point had run up against steely opposition, not just in the neighborhood itself, but among historic-preservationists across Baltimore and beyond. To mollify them, the mayor and his highway planners proposed burying the highway in a tunnel that would run beneath the Inner Harbor just offshore from Fell’s Point, at a cost of $145 million. Mollification was expensive, and housing commissioner Robert Embry, among others, proposed abandoning the entire eastern leg. It was too costly.6
Elimination of this leg would be an awkward step. The eastward extension was designed to handle much of the truck traffic generated by the industrial plants in Southeast Baltimore. Canceling it would undermine the Schaefer administration’s argument that the 3A system was needed to keep manufacturing firms from leaving Baltimore. But there was still some mileage left in the administration’s case. The 3A plan included a harbor crossing that would link the tip of Locust Point, close by Fort McHenry, to the Canton waterfront. It would reach Southeast Baltimore industries while diverting through-traffic away from downtown.7
ROADBLOCKS
The East-West Expressway and its Fort McHenry crossing were a prominent issue in William Donald Schaefer’s first campaign for mayor in 1971. At a debate before the Locust Point Civic Association, mayoral candidate and city solicitor George Russell called Schaefer “the cement king of Baltimore . . . steeped in programs favoring highways and interstate systems.” The expressway was a touchy issue in Locust Point because the area’s residents were united and vehement in their opposition to the Fort McHenry crossing. All of the candidates at the debate—even Schaefer—declared themselves opposed to the crossing. Schaefer claimed that the highway would subside into an entirely imaginary and previously unmentioned tunnel somewhere west of the Inner Harbor, pass beneath the Basin, and resurface somewhere east of Fell’s Point.8
After winning the election, Schaefer resumed his advocacy of the less fanciful Fort McHenry crossing and confronted the united opposition of the three councilmen from the Sixth District, who represented Locust Point. They were supported in their defiance by local bosslet and state senator Harry “Soft Shoes” McGuirk, known for his political stealth—it was said that no one ever saw him, but he was always there. McGuirk introduced a bill to prohibit construction of the highway through Federal Hill or near Fort McHenry. Locust Point residents picketed the Monday night meetings of the city council, some dressed in military garb of the War of 1812, linking the protection of their neighborhood to Fort McHenry’s historic defense of Baltimore. Others dressed as clowns.9
The councilmen of the Sixth District rarely made trouble for the mayor. Because of their compliant and cooperative approach to politics, they were known collectively as the “Silent Sixth.” But Schaefer’s harshly punitive response to their defiance on the expressway issue took no account of their previous agreeability. He rejected all requests for city support of projects in their district—right down to a $7,500 appropriation to equip a playground. Having made his point, the mayor agreed to a modest realignment of the tunnel to an underwater path just offshore from Fort McHenry. Some Pointers continued to object, but the plan reduced the tunnel’s intrusiveness and contributed to Schaefer’s reconciliation with the Silent Sixth.10
Other highway-related battles awaited the mayor. The Movement Against Destruction promoted an alternative to Schaefer’s expressway—no expressway. At first, MAD’s constituency had embraced black residents of Rosemont and Harlem Park together with white liberals and leftists attached to CORE. But the highway builders’ designs on East Baltimore extended the organization’s membership base to white working-class residents of Little Italy, Fell’s Point, Canton, Highlandtown, and Washington Hill. The expressway gave MAD’s divided constituency a common enemy and helped to override past disagreements on matters of race that had intensified in the wake of the 1968 riot, along with more recent tensions roused by federal pressure to achieve racial balance in the public schools.11
Though highway construction had not yet touched Southeast Baltimore, the expressway had already wounded Canton. The city had acquired hundreds of the neighborhood’s row houses by condemnation to clear a corridor for the road, uprooting their residents and stiffening the opposition of those who remained. More than a decade after the condemnation ordinance, one Canton resident still felt that “the road and the torn-down houses are a very touchy subject in our neighborhood. The elderly people are very bitter, because a lot of people died. They were born and raised down there.”12 The neighborhood’s trauma drew its inhabitants together in the Southeast Council Against the Road (SCAR), a constituent in the MAD federation.
MAD itself had been temporarily stymied by the road-building tactics of Mayor Schaefer, who attempted to initiate work on as many segments of the expressway as possible. By multiplying the targets for highway resisters, the tactic tended to fragment the opposition and left MAD to play whack-a-mole with no focus for protest. So MAD adopted a new tactic of its own. Along with other anti-expressway groups (and former city councilman Thomas Ward), it sued. To sue, plaintiffs had to show that they had standing. In other words, they had to demonstrate that they would suffer some tangible harm as a result of the highway’s construction. Owning property that would be taken or damaged by the road would be the most obvious way to establish standing. But taking the city to court had become an option for a host of other expressway opponents after Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It required every project financed or sponsored by the federal government to file an Environmental Impact Statement. Organizations like MAD could sue city hall simply by claiming an interest in the environmental damage likely to result from the highway—air pollution, for example.13
No one won the suit that finally stopped the expressway. MAD, the Sierra Club, and Volunteers Opposed to the Leakin Park Expressway (VOLPE) all sued officials of the city and its Interstate Division in federal district court, arguing that the hearings held on an essential section of the expressway to be built through Leakin and Gwynns Falls Parks had not given adequate attention to the social, economic, and environmental impact of the project. The Leakin Park segment would connect the expressway with I-170, which approached the city from the west. In June 1972, Judge James Miller issued a temporary injunction halting all work on this stretch of highway until new hearings were held. In his written opinion, however, the judge expressed confidence that the defendants in the suit would be able to meet all the objections of the expressway opponents. At the hearings in December, more than 150 people signed up to speak, many from nearby Dickeyville, a prosperous, white neighborhood on the city’s western, semi-suburban fringe. Only three speakers supported the highway. One lived in the area; the others were the president of the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce and William Boucher of the Greater Baltimore Committee.14
In January 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency criticized a draft of the new environmental impact statement submitted by the Interstate Division as “inaccurate and misleading.” By early summer of 1975, the revised environmental impact report filled three loose-leaf binders, and highway officials predicted that they would return to court and ask Judge Miller to lift his injunction by the end of the year. The report had cost $198,000. The cost of the expressway had risen by $26 million. By early fall, the city’s Interstate Division reported that the stretch of highway leading from downtown toward Leakin Park—the Franklin-Mulberry segment—had doubled in cost over the previous three years, to $50 million, and new storm drains would add another $20 million. By mid-autumn, the expressway’s total price had risen to $1.4 billion. In 1977, an official of the Interstate Division announced that his agency had been preoccupied with the stretch of road that was supposed to carry I-83 east across Little Italy, around Fell’s Point, and through Canton, but would soon turn its attention to the Leakin Park section. Because of the “time lapse” since the last hearings, he said, “we will definitely hold the hearings over again. I would say next fall.” He added that one of the options to be considered was a “no expressway” alternative.15
City council president Walter Orlinsky had already introduced a bill scrapping the Leakin Park section of the highway, and at the inauguration ceremony following Schaefer’s reelection in 1979, he urged the mayor to abandon both the route through the park and the eastward extension of I-83. The next day, Schaefer uncharacteristically admitted doubts of his own about building the road through the park, and though frequently at odds with Orlinsky, the mayor complimented him on “a good speech.” In 1980, finance director Benton announced that because of runaway inflation and falling automobile revenues, “We have no money to do any more than we have currently committed.” The city had not spent its full allotment of federal highway funds, but it intended to request that the remaining money be transferred to local rapid transit projects.16 The East-West Expressway was finished.
Mayor Schaefer was far from finished, but he had ridden the East-West Expressway straight into a political dilemma. A supportive coalition of mobilized neighborhoods had lent political substance to the formal power of his office, but the expressway had antagonized people in many of those neighborhoods—Canton, Highlandtown, Fell’s Point. Little Italy, Dickeyville, Harlem Park, Rosemont, Locust Point, and Washington Hill. Baltimore’s all-too-numerous neighborhoods seem to have splintered the city’s comprehensive expressway plan in much the same way that Baltimore’s political incoherence had held back completion of its sanitary sewer system generations earlier.
The incomplete highway was only one of Schaefer’s frustrations. During his first year in office, he had presented his mayoral agenda in a speech and slide show at a Baltimore Advertising Club luncheon. Like the admen, he said, he had a product to sell—Baltimore. He was determined to create a “positive attitude” about the place, but he had plans for the city’s physical as well as psychological redevelopment. In addition to the 3A expressway, the mayor mentioned his Approachways project and Outer City initiative. He announced that the city would build a pyrolysis plant to dispose of Baltimore’s garbage and reduce its reliance on the shrinking capacity of landfills. The plant would incinerate solid waste at low oxygen levels to limit air pollution emissions and sharply reduce the volume of the remaining waste, which could be mined to recycle metals. Pyrolysis failed for technological reasons, however, and the city wrote off its investment in the process. Schaefer had also begun his mayoral tenure with an attempt to augment the city’s middle-class population by building a residential “new town in town” at Coldspring, near an arboretum in Northwest Baltimore. It had fallen well short of its 3,700 planned housing units because of financial problems. Housing commissioner Embry launched a more successful effort to attract middle-class households by selling abandoned homes in selected neighborhoods for a dollar apiece, provided that purchasers would renovate the buildings to bring them up to the housing code. The city offered low-interest financing to cover the costs of rehabilitation.17
STRUGGLE OVER SCHOOLS
Not surprisingly, some of the most difficult issues for Schaefer were the ones that did not appear on his own agenda. After a period of adjustment following the Brown decision of 1954, for example, the city had rested on its open-enrollment version of school desegregation. Given that the city’s residential areas were segregated, its neighborhood schools would remain largely segregated too. In 1968, city solicitor George Russell issued an opinion stating that the city’s school integration policy did not comply with recent opinions of the US Supreme Court. City council president Schaefer argued against a review of the policy because it would lead to discussion of the race issue.18
Black parents and the local branch of the NAACP, however, insisted on talking about it. They complained that the school system’s practices stalled progress toward integration. The parents registered their complaints with the US Civil Rights Commission, but stopped short of filing suit. Perhaps, as Howell Baum suggests, Baltimore’s African Americans were constrained by the same liberal ideology that sanctified freedom of choice or saw the limited changes in public schools as first steps toward more sweeping racial integration.19
The issue was taken out of local hands in 1970, when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It alleged that HEW was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin” in any “program or activity” financed by the federal government. Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, local school systems received billions of dollars in federal funds to reduce the educational handicaps of children from low-income or minority-group households. For Baltimore, the act meant that federal aid rose almost immediately from 1 percent of the school budget to 10 percent. The NAACP charged that HEW had an affirmative responsibility to ensure that school systems receiving federal support did not practice racial segregation. A federal district court decided in favor of the NAACP, and the result was sustained on appeal. Baltimore’s school system was one of those covered by the decision in Adams v. Richardson.20
Roland Patterson had become Baltimore’s superintendent of schools in 1971, not long before Schaefer was elected mayor. In April 1973, Patterson received a letter from Peter Holmes, director of HEW’s Office of Civil Rights, calling on the school system to meet the integration standard set out in the Adams case. Patterson would have to explain why any of his schools deviated by more than 20 percent from the overall percentage of black children in the system. Baltimore’s public school population was 70 percent black, so to qualify as integrated, a school’s African American enrollment could range from 50 to 90 percent. Of more than 200 schools in Baltimore, almost half operated outside this range. Teachers were also segregated. One school’s staff was all-white; nine had only black teachers. The results of Baltimore’s open-enrollment plan were unsatisfactory to HEW and the federal judiciary.21 The school system had to adopt a desegregation plan acceptable to the department’s Office of Civil Rights or lose millions of dollars in federal aid.
Superintendent Patterson labored under several burdens. First, he was not a Baltimorean. He had come to the city from Seattle and had only a short time to adjust to the city’s peculiarities—especially its longstanding reluctance to make race an issue of public discussion. He had caused a stir at his job interview when he charged that large numbers of political prisoners were being held in America’s prisons. Some school board members were “visibly upset” by the remark, but it provoked applause among African American members of the community panel invited to participate in the interview process.22 Second, the demands from Holmes and HEW arrived just as Patterson’s teachers went on strike. Third, Patterson’s operating style may have alienated important figures in city government. He told finance director Benton, for example, that he would need $7.5 million in additional funds to cover the cost of desegregating the schools. According to the budget analyst assigned to review the request, it could be “separated into three categories: related to the desegregation plan; related to previously denied FY 75 budget request; and not related to anything at all.” The analyst concluded that no more than $297,000 could be attributed to the desegregation process.23 In other words, the superintendent seemed to be exploiting the desegregation issue to beef up his budget. And finally, Patterson’s problems may have been magnified by the fact that he was Baltimore’s first black school superintendent. Other black educators had served as interim superintendents, but Patterson was the first to receive a “permanent” appointment as superintendent. He would not be permanent much longer.
Patterson insisted—and HEW agreed—that a legally sufficient response to HEW’s demand for integration need not include busing. Baltimore’s new integration plan proposed school “pairings” as a remedy for racial imbalance. Elementary schools with large white student enrollments would be matched with geographically proximate schools where black students predominated. Pupil transfers between the paired schools would aim to increase racial balance. The elementary schools would be designated as “feeders” to junior high schools so as to increase desegregation there, and some senior highs would become magnet schools with educational specialties that would draw students from the city at large.24 But in the white working-class neighborhoods of Southeast Baltimore, anger and anxiety boiled up in protest against “forced busing”—even though no public official had proposed it. It may have been an anticipatory protest. Southeast Baltimore was so solidly white that some of its leaders and many of its residents assumed that busing to distant neighborhoods would be necessary to satisfy the requirements of HEW. A city councilman told an audience of 1,200 protesters that “school pairings” proposed under the city’s new desegregation plan was “just another code word for busing.”25
Many of Baltimore’s black residents regarded the antibusing protests in white neighborhoods as encoded racism. Against the background of heightened racial tension, city council president Walter Orlinsky demanded an audit to determine whether Patterson had shifted funds for supplies and materials to pay school system salaries. Patterson responded that the audit was a racist ploy intended to undermine any desegregation plan that he might propose to HEW. Mayor Schaefer made things worse. George Russell, his opponent in the Democratic primary, submitted a frosty letter informing Schaefer that he would resign as city solicitor on June 30, 1974. Without informing Russell, the mayor appointed a successor to take over on June 4. Russell regarded this as “tantamount to a firing” and complained that he “didn’t even get the courtesy of a letter.”26
The discourtesies added to the racial antagonisms of the moment and offended the sensibilities of the city’s black leaders, some of whom met at the offices of the Afro-American. They issued a statement asserting that “black citizens take these rude dismissals as an insult to each and every black citizen.” They went on to complain about the underrepresentation of African Americans on the city’s boards and commissions, and finished with a dozen demands concerning the conduct and composition of the school board, the treatment of Roland Patterson, and increased financial support for schools.27 An article in the Sun hinted that the city might be headed for another race riot. With racial tensions at the boiling point, Schaefer faced an outburst of militant unionism among city employees. The sanitation workers walked out in July, leaving piles of garbage to ferment in the summer heat. Soon they were joined by groundskeepers at the city schools, many guards at the city jail, and the sewer workers. The police began a “job action,” issuing nuisance tickets. The mayor’s limousine got one. When Schaefer failed to respond to their pay demands, many officers stopped showing up for work, especially in West Baltimore. While 50 policemen picketed the Western District police station, looters were carrying off the merchandise of liquor stores just two blocks away. Schaefer chose this moment in 1974 to announce a new promotional campaign to present Baltimore as “Charm City,” a tourist destination.28
In 1975, William Donald Schaefer faced reelection. Parren Mitchell, formerly director of the local antipoverty program and now a congressman, declared himself a candidate for Schaefer’s job. But he hinted that he might be willing to withdraw if Schaefer invited a black candidate to displace one of his white ticket-mates for city council president or comptroller, and some observers suggested that Mitchell’s candidacy might also be related to the renewal of Roland Patterson’s contract. Mitchell’s venture assumed that the city’s African American leaders and voters would unify behind him, but his base was in West Baltimore, and one of the deepest fissures in black Baltimore ran between the east and west sides of the city. State delegate John Douglass and city council member Clarence “Du” Burns, both East Baltimore leaders, hoped that Mitchell’s challenge might push the mayor in their direction. Schaefer took the hint. The mayor’s office steered hundreds of Neighborhood Youth Corps summer jobs to Burns and groups associated with his Eastside Democratic Organization.29 Schaefer’s political alliance with black politicians from proletarian East Baltimore helped to reinforce the division that separated them from the college-educated political dynasts of West Baltimore.
State senator Julian Lapides filed a complaint with the US Labor Department concerning Schaefer’s allocation of Youth Corps jobs. Lapides headed the Mount Royal Democratic Club, whose candidates for city council regularly competed with those of Burns’s organization; both groups operated in the city’s Second District. Lapides charged that the mayor’s lopsided allocation of summer jobs made a fair election in the district impossible. He had earlier indicated that he might challenge Mayor Schaefer’s bid for reelection. Schaefer and Burns had more than one reason to join forces.30
Patterson’s contract as school superintendent came up for renewal in the same year that Mayor Schaefer faced reelection. During his first term as mayor, Schaefer had appointed several new members to the school board, which now had an African American majority. Supporters of Superintendent Patterson held prayer vigils outside school headquarters while the board discussed his future inside. But Schaefer’s appointments had undercut black support for Patterson. Now that there was a black majority on the school board, Patterson’s retention seemed less essential to African Americans, and the new balance on the board also increased the likelihood that any successor to Patterson would be black.
The board fired Patterson in June 1975. Three of the board’s black members supported his dismissal. Parren Mitchell withdrew as mayoral candidate not long afterward, and Mayor Schaefer and his ticket prevailed in what was generally regarded as a dull campaign. Its most prominent issues turned on proposals to construct a subway line and a downtown baseball stadium. If approved, the two projects would be completed so far in the future that they generated little immediate excitement. Voter turnout, according to one election official, was at its lowest in 15 years. “It’s not that people don’t care,” said Mayor Schaefer. “The people of Baltimore are satisfied. There are no problems, no issues. Everything is okay.” A Sun editorial responded by enumerating respects in which Baltimore was not okay, but one of the municipality’s most immediate vexations was about to dissolve.31
In May 1975, the HEW’s Office of Civil Rights had initiated administrative proceedings to cut off $23 million in federal aid to Baltimore’s school system on the ground that the school board had failed to produce an acceptable desegregation plan.32 In January 1976, the city filed suit in federal court to obtain an injunction that would halt HEW’s action against its school system. The city’s attorneys argued that the Office of Civil Rights had never specified exactly what was wrong with the city’s desegregation plans or what should be done to make them acceptable. The Baltimore School Board prevailed in the federal district court, but HEW appealed. The appeals court heard the case en banc and initially voted four to three to reverse the lower-court decision. But one of the judges in the majority died of a heart attack before having an opportunity to read the minority opinion, and Baltimore’s attorneys summoned up the precedents to ensure that his vote could not be counted. The tie vote meant that the district court’s decision stood undisturbed. Justice Department lawyers refused to appeal to the US Supreme Court to avoid the risk that a decision applying only to Maryland might be extended to the entire country.33
BUILDING THE RECREATIONAL CITY
Schaefer’s defense of the school system against HEW seemed to exhaust his interest in public education, though he continued to rely on the school system as a source of patronage jobs for his African American adherents.34 While city and federal officials were squabbling over desegregation plans, the proportion of African American students in the public schools had risen from 70 to 77 percent, further reducing the prospects for real racial integration. To Schaefer, perhaps, the work of rebuilding an urban school system to educate the children of the poor seemed just too complicated to succeed.35
But the passion that Mayor Schaefer invested in public sanitation and pothole repair rose to grander projects designed to uplift both the city’s spirit and its economy. Harborplace was the symbolic integration of these goals, an expression of civic pride and commercialism. The idea of harbor-side development had been in the air at least since Mayor McKeldin mentioned it in his 1963 inaugural address. By the time Schaefer’s second term approached its end, the old warehouses and rotting piers had been cleared away, leaving a desolate emptiness on the city’s doorstep. The mayor demanded that something be done. The Charles Center / Inner Harbor Management Corporation landscaped the area. Its beautification efforts created a waterfront park so attractive that it became a popular gathering place for Baltimoreans, especially those who worked in downtown office buildings. Schaefer, however, had other plans for the location.
The mayor had already received approval and full or partial financing for a convention center several blocks west of the Inner Harbor, a science center to the south, and an aquarium on the east, and the city had become a shareholder in a new Hyatt Regency to be built near the convention center. The lynchpin that transformed these isolated projects into an integrated development was the strip of parkland where Baltimore met the water along the north and west margins of the Inner Harbor.
Schaefer backed a scheme conceived by developer James Rouse. It would create a $22 million “festival mall” on 3.2 acres of the 29-acre waterside park—two pavilions at right angles to one another, north and west of the harbor. They would house shops and restaurants. Along with the aquarium, the convention center, the science center, and the Hyatt Regency, the Rouse plan would convert the Inner Harbor into a tourist destination. The idea had taken hold among Baltimore’s planners and developers two years earlier during celebration of the nation’s bicentennial. In Baltimore, the festivities included the arrival of eight tall ships in the Inner Harbor. Their visit drew more than 100,000 spectators, who lined the waterfront from Fell’s Point around the Basin to the top of Federal Hill.36
The success of the event set Baltimore’s business and political leaders thinking of the Inner Harbor as a tourist attraction, and that led to the plan for Harborplace. But the proposal ran up against general opposition among Baltimoreans, including some of the city’s more prominent residents. Eugene Feinblatt, chairman of the Urban Renewal and Housing Commission, thought the parklike “Baltimore Common” on the waterfront had achieved the objective envisioned in Rouse’s plan for commercial development. It had drawn Baltimoreans to the Inner Harbor. “At the time the Plan was adopted,” he wrote, “we did not, in our wildest dreams, envision the present appeal, popularity and utilization of the Inner Harbor as a gathering place.” Feinblatt argued that the waterfront park was an “almost unique environment and its scope, sweep and its openness should be preserved without undue physical impediment or visual distraction.” Attorney and investor Zanvyl Krieger was concerned about the impact a Hyatt Regency would have on his stake in the Lord Baltimore Hotel, to which he had provided financial support “in the interest of the city.”37 A variety of less prominent Baltimoreans stood against any commercial encroachment on the public space to which they had staked their claim by collective use. Citizens for the Preservation of the Inner Harbor embarked on a petition drive for a ballot question to prevent any commercial development on the Basin’s perimeter. Mayor Schaefer countered with a ballot question of his own that would preserve 26 acres of open space while permitting construction of Rouse’s pavilions. The Citizens for Preservation needed 10,000 signatures to put its proposition on the 1978 election ballot. Schaefer needed only the support of 10 city council members to get his measure before the voters.
In Baltimore, at least, the battle of the ballot questions drew far more attention and emotion than the contests for governor or state legislature. But it also confused voters. To express their preferences effectively, they had to vote in favor of one of the two propositions and against the other. The Citizens for Preservation charged that the mayor had deliberately attempted to mystify the electorate, and it stepped up its efforts to defeat Schaefer’s proposition, especially in the neighborhoods of South Baltimore. According to the Sun, the group portrayed its crusade as a David-and-Goliath struggle—“Big City Hall, Big Mayor Schaefer, Big Rouse Company versus little man and little woman.” But the preservationists’ claim to speak for the city’s grassroots was vigorously contested. The mayor’s long cultivation of community and civic organizations paid off. The CPHA sided with Schaefer and Rouse, as did a diverse array of neighborhood associations that belonged to the mayor’s political base. About 100,000 citizens cast their votes on the Harborplace ballot questions. The mayor’s question won by about 17,000 votes; the Citizens for Preservation’s question fell short by less than 10,000.38
After the victory of Harborplace, the mayor’s reelection in 1979 seemed anticlimactic. His opponents in the Democratic primary were political nonentities. But the criticisms were more prominent than the candidates. The mayor’s “Charm City” offensive seemed to overlook those citizens whose lives were short on charm. While the city courted middle-class households for its dollar-a-house homesteading program and Coldspring Newtown development, 24,000 Baltimoreans were on the waiting list for public housing, and Schaefer had no plans to build additional public housing. In its effort to attract tourists and taxpayers, the city had spent one-third of its federal urban renewal and community development aid on Harborplace and a new housing development for middle-income residents.39 Federal authorities would later rule that some of these expenditures were illegal. Under Schaefer, the public schools’ share of the budget remained constant, but only because of increased state aid for the city’s educational system. The local contribution to the education budget actually declined during his administration. An article in the New Republic criticized the mayor for neglecting the city’s low-income and African American residents, but conceded that his “positive thinking” had engendered “a genuine atmosphere of achievement and hope.”40
The hopeful atmosphere had begun to take hold in Baltimore even before Harborplace provided a focus for the city’s aspirations. In 1976, Baltimore’s Daily Record announced that the city was providing a “model for ‘new’ U.S. Cities.” Baltimore had accumulated budget surpluses for three consecutive years; it was retiring more municipal bonds than it was issuing. As the journal of the city’s business and legal communities, the Record naturally made much of budgets and bonds, but it also claimed that Baltimore, more than most cities, had “managed to heal the racial, social, and physical wounds of the turbulent 1960’s” by being “responsive to its own internal needs.” Its inward-looking parochialism helped its residents come to terms with one another. The city’s mayor “had no charisma at all . . . [he was] just low key, down to earth and very effective.” His approach “fit in well with Baltimore’s traditional style, and made communication easier between neighborhood residents, business, labor, state and local governments.”41
Baltimoreans, of course, might be prone to see their city as a model for others, but out-of-town observers were also finding that Baltimore, once regarded as “hopelessly dull,” had undergone a “dramatic renaissance,” beginning downtown and spreading to the margins of the harbor and beyond to the city’s many neighborhoods. Baltimore, according to the New York Times, had “lain in the shadow of bigger and better known neighbors”—Philadelphia and Washington. But the city was “holding its head higher these days,” not only because of downtown renewal but because of neighborhood preservation: “Above all, extensive renovation in Colonial-era neighborhoods like Federal Hill and Fells Point has given the city a new national image.” The Wall Street Journal looked behind the national image to the city’s inner life. Baltimore had its cultural attractions but opted out of competition “for national attention with major cultural centers.” Instead, it was “free to concentrate its efforts inward to improve the aesthetic lives of its own inhabitants.” The city’s vitality, according to the Journal, was a by-product of its internal diversity, its multiplicity of ethnic and neighborhood cultures.42
Seen by travelers on the way from Washington, DC, to New York, Baltimore was “Factory Town, a chuckhole in the eastern megalopolis.” But when a writer for National Geographic stopped to explore Baltimore, he found it “mellow, antique, friendly. Riding the gentle slopes of the land, waves of row houses—neighborly, Victorian, of enduring brick—line the streets in subtly changing patterns.” It was the “city with a thousand footnotes.” F. Scott Fitzgerald (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) had lived here while Zelda was treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “Baltimore,” he wrote, “is so rich with memories . . . it is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great uncle and to know that Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”43