How Baltimore Did Waterfront Redevelopment.

On the way to Chincoteague, the fam and I spend a few days visiting some old friends. One day in Baltimore we hit the aquarium, ate some seafood (trust me on this, get your crabcakes on the Maryland side of the Bay) and hooked up with some college buddies of mine. We got a deal on a tour of the Inner Harbour by taking the water taxi around and having my friends narrate the tour.

One of the frequent refrains about What Cleveland Should Do is that someone needs to do something with the lakefront. And one of the frequent comparisons I hear is Baltimore. Baltimore put up the first throwback baseball-only stadium and they dropped it into their resurgent Inner Harbor area. Maybe it's the temporal proximity of Camden Yards and the Jake, but more than once I've heard folks say "Look what Baltimore did."

I don't begin to claim any understanding of what that would take to develop the lakefront, what the current barriers are, who owns the available properties. But since I hear the comparison, I took some pictures to post a tour for anyone who wants to take it.

As you head out from the Inner Harbor, you pass the Rusty Scupper, one of a number of waterfront bar/restaurant nitespots. An awful lot what's on the waterfront is this sort of entertainment venue.

In the background you can see not one but two construction cranes. I still do a double-take sometimes when I see the construction cranes at Northside Lofts. We just haven't seen new construction like that around Akron in forever.


One crane is putting up a set of Ritz-Carlton condos. Condos on the water is another theme of Balto's waterfront redevelopment. Serious condos with major amendities, access on the water and high-end prices.

And by the way, you can see the row houses in one of the soon-to-be-gentrified working-class neighborhoods that border the harbor frontage.

All of which raises a few concerns. First, does Cleveland have a market for that kind of housing? The sheer volume on the Harbor is amazing. Scores, if not hundreds of units built on the water or in converted industrial buildings. I think not. I think this sort of development doesn't lead economic growth, it follows it.

Ditto the entertainment venues. This also reaches back to the casino/Learn and Earn debate. Mushrooming entertainment complexes seem to me a sign of growth rather than a growth engine. Too much of what we hear about in NEO is entertainment or retail development -- that's another one. Places whose business model is about people spending money on finished product don't seem likely to create real growth. Growth happens when value-added businesses set up shop.

Next stop on the tour is the Domino's Sugar factory. This is still a working factory, though word is that most of the work is done elsewhere and operations are scaling down. Since the factory is one of the enduring landmarks of the city -- the sign by the way is the second-largest neon sign in North America -- the building will be hot property for an office space conversion.


Like the old Tide plant -- now Tide Point, a former Proctor and Gamble factory, now a state-of-the-art office space, complete with an on-site day-care.

Now that's some redevelopment! But again, where is the chicken that laid this egg? Could this have happened without the burgeoning tech economy in the DC suburbs knocking on Baltimore's door?


And of course, the convertable properties have to exist. Warehouses like this one have enough challenges. The sort of heavy industry that built Cleveland carries a whole new set of challenges. Not insurmountable as the AES Building shows, but there are brownfields to clean up, floors to cut through, plenty more I don't know about.

Not to mention the aesthetic challenges. At the risk of getting spammed by fanatical Hullet lovers, I've always wondered if anyone would say out loud that the Hullets are, well, ugly. A warehouse conversion can be funky and attractive. The bones of Cleveland's industrial economy just arent' that attractive.

Toward the end of the tour we find the Marine Bank building -- across from Ft. McHenry, more or less. From here the harbor opens up on its way to being part of the larger bay.

Which raises my final misgiving. Baltimore harbor is a harbor. It is sheltered from the elements in a way the Cleveland lakefront isn't. Not only is the weather milder in Baltimore (though it was hella hot the day we were there), Baltimore doesn't get the full blast of wind coming off a large body of water. I've found myself freezing on summers days on the lakefront. All of which poses an additional layer of challenges to any sort of condo/restaurant/waterfront office development strategy.

No doubt Lake Erie is an asset that Northeast Ohio has underutilized in the days since it's use as byway for large quantities of raw materials to feed our factories. But I suspect that something more needs to happen before developing the waterfront makes sense.