The Original City Fair Helped Baltimore Rebound from the ’68 Riots

The City Fair launched in 1970 on a shoestring budget, run out of a vacant furniture building at Charles and Franklin streets. Office equipment included desks cast off from the school system. Naysayers, including the mayor, thought the whole idea naïve. Who would attend a three-day, county-style fair in downtown Baltimore two years after the ’68 riots? It turned out, 350,000 people that inaugural year. Nearly double the following September. Soon a million visitors.

“Bob Embry [then-Housing and Community Development director] invited Hope Quackenbush and me, who worked for him, to lunch to brainstorm something to bring people downtown,” PR maven Sandy Hillman remembers. “We came up with a civic celebration that would get city neighborhoods together in the same space at the same time. Tommy D’Alesandro, the mayor, was not convinced this was a good idea on the heels of the riots. Don Schaefer was the City Council president then and so we went to him. He loved it.”

Ultimately, the City Fair withered after being displaced by Harborplace. But it served as proof of concept for the Farmers Market, which Hillman got going in 1977, and Artscape, five years later. The 1970 fair also brought fireworks back to the Inner Harbor for the first time, reportedly, since 1781, when 50,000 Baltimoreans climbed Federal Hill to celebrate Maryland joining the United States.

The 1970s was a gritty, challenging time, of course. The fair’s opening acts often reflected, one might say, the era’s “nothing to lose” attitude. In 1972, The Great Zacchini, known as the Human Cannonball, was shot 200 feet over the Inner Harbor. In 1973, 68-year-old Karl Wallenda, pictured above, walked—and did a headstand—on a six-story, high-wire strung from the mast of the USS Constellation. In 1979, Doug Jones, a 26-year-old “Culligan Man” from Carroll County, climbed a 165-foot ladder and dove into 25 feet of water.

The true spirit of the fair, however, was its sense of togetherness. On its very first Saturday night, a late storm whipped through, toppling numerous booths.

“The next morning, people from different neighborhoods, across racial and demographic lines, helped each other,” remembers Bob Hillman, Sandy’s husband, and the City Fair’s first chair. “That rebuilding had a tremendous psychological effect, not only among the mix-and-match participants involved in the clean-up, but with everyone. It was an incredible statement about what a city can be.”

The annual fair didn’t include just carnival rides, local food, and off-the-wall stunts, but top-notch entertainment like Baltimore’s first lady of jazz, Ethel Ennis, and a certain Douglass High alum named Cab Calloway.

Rolling with unexpected weather issues, as well as scheduling snafus, is inevitably part of such event planning. The Glenn Miller Orchestra, booked as the closing act in 1971, for example, got lost on their way to perform. That prompted quick-thinking Sandy Hillman to divert the Orioles’ team bus, which was headed back to Baltimore from then-Friendship International Airport (now BWI) to the fair. The team had clinched the AL East title with a weekend sweep in Cleveland.

“They arrived as the band finally got there and had begun playing,” Bob Hillman recounts with a wry laugh. “The Orioles come out on the stage, and the place goes wild. Afterward, Jim Palmer, who had no idea that there was even thing called the City Fair, comes up to Sandy and says, ‘It’s amazing you got this all together for us in a couple of hours.’”