Why It Matters

• For centuries, Baltimore City grew right along with its suburbs, annexing one ring of new developments after another. Then, in 1948, Maryland voters approved a constitutional amendment known as Question 5 that made future annexations by the city all but impossible.
• The timing couldn’t have been worse. In the postwar years, wealthy city residents moved to the suburbs in droves, leaving the core of our metropolitan area saddled with the bulk of the poor and needy—and without the tax base to provide services for them. Unlike in the past, the city was now unable to capture any of the booming suburban wealth it had done so much to create.

To explain what is meant by “Baltimore Seals Its Borders,” we need to go back to the election season of 1948—by any measure, one tumultuous affair. With the nation transfixed by a Dewey-Truman presidential race so tight that some media outlets predicted the wrong winner, Marylanders also juggled a combustible array of controversial bond issues and referendum questions. Citizen interest in politics was so high that, in Baltimore County, an astonishing 93 percent of registered voters turned out at the polls.

Amid this hullabaloo, no one paid much mind to a drab-sounding referendum question down near the bottom of the ballot. Proposed by Democratic state Senator William P. Bolton of Baltimore County, Question 5 sought to amend the state constitution so that any future land annexations by Baltimore City would require a special vote of approval by the residents living within the proposed annexation area.

To folks who weren’t avid followers of how annexation worked, this probably sounded innocent enough. But those who were paying attention knew what the question was really getting at—and that it would ultimately prevent any new annexations by the city.

Still, the issue had no pressing immediacy attached to it. Three decades had passed since the city last gobbled up any new land, in 1918. There were no annexation proposals on the table in 1948, and there were no plans to introduce any in the foreseeable future.

That’s why Baltimore City greeted the appearance of Question 5 with a big yawn of indifference. The city’s representatives in Annapolis didn’t try and stop it from getting on the ballot; in fact, some of them voted with Bolton to put it there. The Chamber of Commerce didn’t see a need to take a position either way. The Sun papers barely mentioned the issue, offering one tiny and tepid editorial of opposition in the run-up to the election.

So, on November 2, 1948, Question 5 passed by a close-but-comfortable margin. The day after the election, this result earned a grand total of one paragraph, buried deep beyond the jump in the Sun’s election roundup.

Today, it earns this from Robert Embry, the president of the Abell Foundation: “It’s hard to think, looking back, of any single public decision that’s proved to be more important to Baltimore City than that question in the 1948 election. It was a very shortsighted decision.”

The reason is a straightforward one: Healthy cities grow, and unhealthy cities don’t.

The fact that Baltimore landed in the unhealthy category for much of the last half of the 20th century isn’t exactly news at this point. Like so many other industrial cities, it struggled to combat a daunting array of urban ills—failing schools, distressed neighborhoods, high unemployment, excessive taxes, declining population, and high crime rates among them.

In the mid-1990’s, Embry’s Abell Foundation asked urban affairs expert David Rusk to take a look at the city, its problems, and its prospects. One thing that Rusk does in his 1998 book Baltimore Unbound: A Strategy for Regional Renewal is draw a straight line from that referendum vote in 1948 to the problems that continue to challenge Baltimore six decades later.

To put it simply: Question 5 turned Baltimore City from a shining jewel into a charity case.

Somewhere off of Lexington Street, in the upper stretches of downtown’s Charles Center development, there once ran a little alleyway called Crooked Lane. It was there—below today’s Saratoga Street—that the original Baltimore Town set its borders in 1730.

In a 1978 article in Maryland Historical Magazine, the late University of Maryland at Baltimore County historian Joseph L. Arnold detailed how Baltimore grew out of its original 60-acre spit of property and into its current boundaries. Early on, expanding the city was a routine affair; the General Assembly did it 12 different times in the 1700’s.

After the Civil War, Maryland adopted a state constitution that required county-to-county annexations be approved by residents subject to the switch. In the 1870s, Baltimore City decided to abide by this rule even though the law never mentioned the word city (an omission that Question 5 in 1948 would rectify). This time, the city had its eyes on “The Belt,” which encompassed such distant burgs as Highlandtown and Canton.

The city lost badly the first time around. In fact, city leaders nearly started a riot when they tried to hold a pro-annexation rally in Highlandtown. But they came back for another, successful try in 1888, by which time Belt residents had grown desperate for proper water and sewer lines.

The city stretched into its current borders in 1918, but only after a hellacious, decade-long fight that saw at least four different annexation proposals go down to defeat before a statewide referendum gave the city control of 35 square miles of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties.

A civic organization called the Greater Baltimore League took the lead in campaigning for that annexation. One of its spokesmen, retired judge Henry D. Harlan, made folks who moved to the outskirts of the city and then fought against annexation sound like the equivalent of those modern-day folks who move next door to an airport and then complain about the noise.

“Those who locate near the city limits are bound to know that the time may come when the legislature will extend the limits and take them in,” Harlan is quoted as saying in the Sun. “No principle of right or justice or fairness places in their hands the power to stop the progress and development of the city, especially in view of the fact that a large majority of them have located near the city for the purpose of getting the benefit of transacting business or securing employment . . . in the city.”

Thirty years later, in 1948, it seems that no one remembered Harlan’s sensible-sounding argument anymore. Maryland’s voters changed their minds, approving Question 5 and fitting Baltimore City into a straitjacket of its 1948 boundaries.

Why bother slogging through all this ancient history? Because it’s not ancient history at all. When a constantly-expanding and vibrant Baltimore City lost its centuries-old ability to expand its borders, it ended up stuck with a preponderance of the region’s poor and needy—and a shortage of the region’s rich and wealthy. The city’s population reached an all-time high in 1950 of more than 949,000; soon thereafter, the exodus out to the new suburbs began. That’s a surefire recipe for civic decay. It happened not just here, but in Cleveland and Detroit and Milwaukee and lots of other cities as well.

But it didn’t happen that way everywhere. Think of cities like Houston, Columbus, Raleigh, and Albuquerque. What did these cities do that enabled them to sign on with the thriving Sun Belt and avoid the fate of the suffering Rust Belt? They did what healthy cities have been doing for centuries—they grew. And they did it the old-fashioned way, by annexing their suburbs—and sharing the wealth.

What if the 1948 election had turned out differently and this had happened in Baltimore, too? What if the city had stretched its borders out to the Beltway? What if it went beyond that, combining the city and the county into a single jurisdiction, whether in whole or in part? We can see real examples of how that worked in cities like Indianapolis and Jacksonville. Both towns implemented versions of this, and it’s worked out pretty well in both places, judging by their lower rates of crime, unemployment, and poverty.

“If Baltimore City and Baltimore County had consolidated—obviously, that’s something that’s not really possible any more, but if it had been possible and if it had happened—Baltimore would be the fifth largest city in America in population,” Rusk says. “It would have all kinds of different resources and tools and flexibility to deal with the urban problems.”

After 1948, Maryland had one more chance to correct the mistake of 1948. In the late 1960’s, the state considered adopting a new constitution that gave the state legislature the power to create “super governments” that would be empowered to oversee and coordinate regional efforts to combat problems across jurisdictions. This proposal did not go over well in Baltimore’s suburbs.

“It would be a matter of days before my friend Tommy [Baltimore Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr.] would be calling for a new super government to include this county,” thundered Carroll County Commissioner Scott S. Blair. After an ugly campaign full of battle-between-the-races undertones, the new constitution went down to defeat at the polls.

And so Baltimore City remained stuck in its 1948 borders. “What that did,” Rusk says, “is cut off Baltimore City’s potential as a Sun Belt city and made it a northern Rust Belt city. It landed Baltimore in the company of Cleveland and Detroit, whereas it might have been able to be more in the category of Charlotte and Atlanta.”

Instead, back in the tumultuous election of 1948, Maryland broke ranks with the ways of the past in a way that landed Baltimore City on the losing side of that divide.

Mention the much-ballyhooed renaissance of Baltimore’s downtown, and what names come to mind? The guess here is that in most any roomful of random Baltimoreans, the two names most likely to pop up are those of politician William Donald Schaefer and developer James Rouse.

This is fair enough, as far as it goes. As Mayor in the 1970’s, Schaefer pushed the Inner Harbor project forward with a highly effective, always entertaining mix of political wiles and manic boosterism. He was in charge that day in 1976 when a fleet of tall ships sailed into the harbor, drawing throngs of tourists to a city that never realized before that such a thing might be possible.

Rouse earned his renaissance stripes a little later. When the shopping and dining pavilions designed by his Rouse Company opened on the Inner Harbor in 1980, they transformed the development from a playground for locals into an international model for the redevelopment of urban waterfronts that would inspire the likes of Barcelona, Belfast, and Sydney to turn their old port districts into tourist destinations.

But while Schaefer and Rouse did their fair share, their names don’t come close to telling the whole story of the renaissance. For that fuller tale, there’s no better source to turn to than Martin Millspaugh.

Millspaugh has been in the thick of downtown redevelopment issues for the last five decades. In the 1950’s, he covered downtown issues for The Evening Sun. Then, after a stint working on urban renewal issues for the federal government, he signed on in 1960 to help lead the redevelopment effort. Today, Millspaugh is playing the role of historian; he’s making a documentary film for the nonprofit Urban Land Institute about the renaissance.

Ask him to broach this topic, and the two-hour discussion that ensues will touch on dozens of names well worth remembering: J. Jefferson Miller, David Wallace, Hunter Moss, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., Theodore McKeldin, Robert Embry Jr., and more.

“That’s one of the amazing things to me about this subject,” Millspaugh says. “Whenever some obstacle loomed up ahead, it seemed like the right person just came along out of the woodwork and took care of it. The cumulative force of people getting together to accomplish something important like this, that’s a powerful thing.”

The story Millspaugh spins unfolds in three chapters. The first opens a couple of days after Christmas 1954, when news broke that the historic O’Neill’s department store was about to shut its doors. Even today, Millspaugh adopts a wistful tone when recalling this turn of events.

“I remember so well going there with my mother when I was a kid,” Millspaugh says. “It was kind of like the Saks Fifth Avenue of Baltimore, a place that people just revered.”

The demise of O’Neill’s struck Baltimore like a sharp slap in the face. It forced civic leaders to take a hard look at the reality of the damage the new postwar economy was doing to downtown. The suburbs were booming, taking middle- and upper-income families out of the city—and away from downtown’s stores and services.

Baltimore’s port was dying. The shipping industry was now using a new generation of container ships too big to maneuver in the cramped Inner Harbor. As a result, the waterfront warehouses that had served Baltimore so well for centuries were fast becoming obsolete.

The situation with office space wasn’t much better. Only one new office building had gone up downtown since the 1920’s. Vacancy rates were at 25 percent and climbing in some places. In the five short years between 1952 and 1957, the assessed value of downtown real estate dropped 10 percent.

“It was such a desperate time, and there was so little hope,” Millspaugh says. “But looking back, it sort of helps to explain why Baltimore was able to accomplish what it did before so many other cities. We were so far behind that we ended up ahead of them. We didn’t have any choice but to try something dramatic.”

“Jeff” Miller, the executive vice president at Hecht’s and a leader of the Retail Merchants Association, convened an emergency meeting of department store owners in the wake of the O’Neill’s closing. He convinced them to launch a new Committee for Downtown and to provide $150,000 in seed money to get it off the ground. The then-fledgling Greater Baltimore Committee soon tossed another $75,000 to the pot.

By Millspaugh’s calculation, that $225,000 adds up in today’s dollars to $1.5 million. That was enough to assemble a planning team headed by Hunter Moss, chair of the GBC’s Planning Council, and David Wallace, a Philadelphia-based city planner.

“David was able to bring in a real blue-ribbon group of young designers,” Millspaugh recalls. “The first thing they did was make a very smart strategic decision. Instead of trying to fix all of downtown, they decided to focus on just one project, something big enough to make a difference but small enough to actually achieve within a relatively short time frame.”

The target they selected was the 33 acres between Charles, Liberty, Saratoga, and Lombard streets. This stretch represented downtown at its worst, Millspaugh explains. He describes it as a “valley of depression” separating the still-healthy financial district to the south and east from the Howard Street corridor to the west that still boasted three popular department stores.

The Charles Center redevelopment plan was unveiled in March of 1958. It called for tearing 85 percent of the site down to the ground, leaving just five old buildings standing. It envisioned a mixed-use development featuring retail, hotel, residential, and office developments interspersed with public plazas and pedestrian skywalks.

“Everyone saw that it was a good plan, but there was still a lot of pessimism at that point,” Millspaugh says. “People would say, ‘We love it! It’s beautiful! But it’ll never happen. This is Baltimore, and things like this don’t get done here.'”

Viewed by today’s standard of civic undertakings, what happened next is difficult to fathom—a mad rush of commitment, unanimity, and selflessness among civic leaders in support of the project. Businessman Isaac Hamburger publicly endorsed a plan that demolished the building that housed his family’s clothing store, a building he’d just spent a small fortune remodeling. Elected city officials raised nary a peep of objection to a plan that demolished a public parking structure that was pretty much brand new. City leaders dangled a princely salary in front of Miller to take on the job of heading up the project; he told them to drop the salary to $1 a year.

In June, Governor McKeldin put Charles Center on the agenda of a special session of the state legislature and pushed the necessary legislation through at breakneck speed. In November, voters overwhelmingly approved $25 million in bond issues to finance acquisition and demolition costs. In March of 1959—one short, frantic year after it was proposed—the City Council and Mayor D’Alesandro signed off on the plan.

The rights to develop the first lot in Charles Center went to the Chicago-based Metropolitan Structures. Designed by the world-renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, One Charles Center was located on the site of the old O’Neill’s department store. It was still going up when Millspaugh signed on to become deputy general manager of the Charles Center project in 1960.

“We had three buildings finished and six others committed by 1963,” Millspaugh says. “We proved to the skeptics that we could do this.” The next year, the Charles Center project picked up the first of what would eventually become a slew of urban design and revitalization awards.

The success of Charles Center was an indispensable step on the road to the Inner Harbor. In fact, Moss and Wallace (along with local leaders) had considered tackling the waterfront first, instead of Charles Center. But sheer logistics scared them off: How long might it take to assemble a workable redevelopment site out of a mishmash of nearly 1,000 small parcels owned variously by the city, the state, the federal government, and private companies?

The second chapter of the renaissance story opens in 1963, when McKeldin—who by this point had left the governor’s mansion and gotten himself elected mayor—decided that the time had come at last to see whether Baltimore could make something of its waterfront. He called Wallace back from Philadelphia. He had Miller and Millspaugh head up a new entity called Charles Center–Inner Harbor Management, Inc. Later, city housing commissioner Robert Embry Jr. came aboard to oversee the initiative.

The Inner Harbor Master Plan they developed was ready in 1964; the first project was completed in 1967. But the logistics were difficult. The first phase of the plan called for office and retail construction along Pratt Street, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the state’s board of public works approved construction of the proposed World Trade Center. Next up came the reconstruction of bulkheads and the development of parkland and a public promenade on the water; that was completed in 1973.

This is the point when the charismatic Schaefer and his Office of Promotion started going into overdrive. They launched a series of gimmicky “Sunny Sunday” celebrations on the water, and they moved the city fair down to the harbor. Soon enough, the Maryland Science Center was going up on the harbor, and plans to build an aquarium had been announced.

“But I have to tell you, that was all the Inner Harbor was ever supposed to be,” Millspaugh says. “It was planned as a playground for Baltimoreans, and it never occurred to anyone back then that Baltimore could be a successful tourist attraction. It might look in hindsight like it all unfolded in a logical progression, but no one involved in planning it saw it unfolding that way.”

And so the third chapter of the renaissance story brings us full circle, to the bicentennial summer of 1976 and the arrival of those tall ships—and all the out-of-towners who came to gawk at them. Next came the National Aquarium, the Rouse-designed pavilions, the Hyatt Regency, and more—much, much more than anyone involved in planning the project ever really envisioned.

Millspaugh breaks out a map of downtown and runs a finger out toward what was then an industrial wasteland east of the Inner Harbor, below Little Italy—the area now known as Harbor East. “Sometimes we used joke about how that was going to turn into Baltimore’s Gold Coast someday,” Millspaugh says. “Then somebody in the room would say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and we’d all laugh at how ridiculous we sounded.”

Why It Matters

• As the city’s center—including its outmoded, rotting piers—began to empty and decay, a group of visionary civic leaders worked to build a new downtown.

• Two projects (Charles Center and Harborplace) gave Baltimore’s commercial heart a new base upon which it eventually built a glittering Inner Harbor that continues to be the city’s celebrated public centerpiece.

In the midst of the red-brick canyons of UMBC’s suburban Baltimore campus stands an elegant sculptural tableau consisting of three polished granite benches and a life-sized bronze statue, all arranged in a tight circle. The statue depicts Baltimore businessman/public servant extraordinaire Walter Sondheim Jr. wearing a suit, a bow tie, and a smile, while each of the benches has been inscribed with a notable Sondheimism—words that, oddly, resonate with the same sort of plain, direct wisdom found in Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book.

“Try to understand someone else’s position and not assume you know what’s best for others.”
“Respect personal and intellectual honesty. It is so much simpler to be honest and fair. It is much more complicated to be dishonest.”
“Do the best you can and drop arrogance at the door. When you go in to give advice, be willing to let someone else take the credit.”

Tellingly, the Sondheim statue’s right index finger points toward that last aphorism. Sondheim, who died this past February at age 98, not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. He spent the majority of his years as a living embodiment of his own adages, always pondering what he thought was best for Baltimore—and never, it seems, putting the needs or ego of Walter Sondheim Jr. ahead of the challenges facing his hometown.

Sondheim provided nearly an entire lifetime of public service that touched on virtually every aspect of civic life, notably education, housing, and, particularly, economic development. Dust the city’s various public and private institutions for fingerprints, and you’ll find Sondheim’s.

“He taught us the meaning of the word citizen, and the importance of believing in ourselves,” observes UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who helped preside over the 2005 dedication of the Sondheim sculpture and benches, as well as the ceremonies renaming the school’s social sciences building Janet and Walter Sondheim Hall. “It was evident that he considered it both a privilege and an obligation to contribute to the city.”

In Zelig-like fashion, Sondheim was present for a handful of Baltimore’s most significant events in the second half of the 20th century—most prominently, the desegregation of public schools in 1954, and the urban renewal renaissance that culminated with the extensive waterfront development of the Inner Harbor in the 1970’s and 1980’s. But unlike Zelig, Sondheim was no mere mute witness, but rather an active participant, unobtrusively midwiving social, economic, and cultural transformation.

He functioned as what The Walt Disney Company terms an “Imagineer,” a behind-the-scenes wizard deftly weaving together the related strands of master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management, and research development. Except that Sondheim wasn’t devising whiz-bang technology for animated feature films or grandiose amusement parks—he was handcrafting a city.

According to Martin Millspaugh, former president, chief executive, and chairman of the Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corporation Inc., Sondheim advised “mayors and boards and organizations in so many different facets of the city’s life. You couldn’t list one particular thing [as being the most important] as much as say he was there and guided what happened—and so much of it was successful.”

The list of leadership roles he held is nearly too much to believe: chairman of the Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corporation. President of the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners. Chairman of the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Commission. Director of the Baltimore Urban League. Senior adviser to the Greater Baltimore Committee. Over the course of more than 60 years, Walter Sondheim served in all of these capacities, not forgetting board positions with a bevy of foundations, hospitals, businesses, and universities.

“He was uniquely public-spirited in terms of being interested in and involved with the issues that affected the city—public policy issues,” states Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation and former commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. “And all this occurred primarily after he retired; but even before he retired, his waking hours were devoted to issues involving public policy questions. It’s hard to find a comparable example of that.”

Born in Baltimore on July 25, 1908, and raised in Bolton Hill, Walter Sondheim Jr. went to the Park School, before graduating from Pennsylvania’s Haverford College in 1929. Soon afterward, he joined Hochschild, Kohn, where his father held an executive position; he married Janet Blum—a professional dancer—in 1934; and retired from the department store in 1970 as senior vice president and treasurer (he also served as a Navy lieutenant in World War II). By that time, Sondheim already had compiled an impressive resume in public service.

Appointed to the city’s school board in 1948, he rose to become its president, and, in 1954, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Sondheim steered his board colleagues into implementing the desegregation of Baltimore’s public schools quickly and without rancor, making Baltimore the first school district south of the Mason-Dixon Line to do so.

“That took real leadership,” says Ed Orser, professor of American Studies at UMBC and an authority on Baltimore history. “Admittedly, the immediate [actions] were rather modest, but nevertheless the step was symbolically quite significant.”

Three years later, Sondheim signed on as chairman of the newly created Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Authority, beginning a half-century odyssey of remaking the cityscape with a thoughtful purposefulness. While Millspaugh and J. Jefferson Miller Jr. oversaw the initial foray into the city’s transformation with the ambitious development of Charles Center beginning in 1958, Sondheim concentrated on a handful of satellite urban renewal projects: the University of Maryland’s downtown campus, Camden Industrial Park, Harlem Park, Broadway, and Mount Royal Plaza, among others.

“A revitalized downtown cannot exist as an oasis in a desert of blight,” Sondheim told business leaders in 1963. “It must be supported by well-housed middle-income city dwellers who are urbanites by choice. . . . Keeping good citizens in the inner city, and re-attracting those who have had enough of lawn mowers and long trips to downtown, is possible only as the city regains its former glamour and desirability. Bringing about this change in areas of housing, as well as of culture and of industry, finance, and commerce, is a major goal of Baltimore’s urban renewal program.

“Strong political leadership, coupled with strong citizen and business leadership, is the only combination that can insure Baltimore’s future as an outstanding example of the revitalized American city.”

Some of the commission’s renewal projects thrived; others foundered. All the while, Sondheim eyed the redevelopment mother lode: the Inner Harbor. “Here is an area that has excited the imagination of architects and planners for many years,” Sondheim noted in that 1963 speech. “It is perhaps our outstanding physical asset. Everyone wants to do something about developing the inner harbor.”

And so in 1970 he migrated to Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management, staying for 19 years (15 as chairman) while accepting only $1 a year as salary. On his watch, he facilitated the makeover of Baltimore’s waterfront from derelict wharves into a commercial/cultural engine by refereeing the push-pull between city government and private developers: Up sprang Harborplace, the Maryland Science Center, and a handful of luxury hotels. Hardly a puppet master, Sondheim instead quietly built consensus between sundry stakeholders to advance projects from conception to completion, abetted by his benign nature and reputation for integrity.

“He was certainly laid back,” recalls Millspaugh. “He didn’t push himself or his ideas forward. He was there when people would say, ‘Walter, what’s your advice?’ He wasn’t really retiring—he was very much a strong person, but not putting anything forward until it was needed.”

Adds Embry, “He was very much behind the scenes. He was not quoted in the newspaper or writing letters to the editor. He was very selfless; there was no question that he was trying to benefit himself in any way, financially or in any other respect. He was very knowledgeable in the sense that he had spent many years involved in these issues, so knew about their history and could put them in context. He was very smart, very intelligent, very articulate, and very non-threatening. And as he grew older, he was more venerated. Thus, the more he did, the more he was respected. There wasn’t anybody else that occupied the position that he did.”

After stepping down from his Charles Center-Inner Harbor post in 1989, Sondheim continued to monitor urban renewal as a senior adviser at the Greater Baltimore Committee, and, in 1991, at the behest of then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer, he chaired a panel that studied school performance, a group informally known as the Sondheim Commission. Its subsequent report established a template for what would morph into the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, and served as a model for the national No Child Left Behind initiative.

Without fanfare, Sondheim created an awesome legacy. Perhaps more than any single individual, he innately understood—intuited, really—Baltimore’s potential, its possibilities, and he worked assiduously to bring them to fruition.

“He wore his coat of influence very lightly,” points out UMBC’s Hrabowski. “It was so clear that his emphasis was on making a difference and not on himself—not about ego, not about turf, not about getting credit.

Why It Matters

• After a career at a legendary city department store, Walter Sondheim Jr. became the city’s strongest advocate, best strategist, and wisest sage.
• Sondheim’s canny diplomacy and unwavering vision helped unite city leaders to fight economic ills and undo social injustices.

William Donald Schaefer, the Michelangelo of Baltimore’s renaissance, first ran for public office under the guidance of Alvie Unglesbie, an earnest but thoroughly unschooled friend from the local neighborhood improvement association. The two of them stepped blithely into a political world owned by Irv Kovens and Jack Pollack.

Those men controlled a citywide network of political clubs regimented into precinct captains, precinct executives, and runners, all eager to show how well they were protecting home turf. A torrent of cash—”walk-around money,” they called it—kept the soldiers focused. Anyone who ran for anything without their blessing was in it for the exercise.
Schaefer’s name appeared on the House of Delegates ballot as Schaefer, William D., yet another handicap. If anyone knew him at all in those days, they knew him as Don.
Still, he thought he had a respectable résumé. He was a vestryman at the Bishop Cummins Memorial Reformed Episcopal Church near his parents’ home on Edgewood Street in West Baltimore. He was a WWII veteran, a member of both the Montfaucon Post American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And he belonged to the Mystic Circle Lodge #104, A. F. & A. M.
He lost big.
Schaefer, William D. ran 13th in a field of 27. He tried again in 1954, finishing seventh, just outside the six-person winner’s circle. Schaefer loved Alvie, but he knew he needed more—namely, Kovens or Pollack. When Kovens or Pollack “took” you on his ballot in those days, everything changed. Schaefer rejected Pollack, whose manner and reputation offended him. Schaefer had watched the big man at Sunday meetings of the city Democrats who convened in the old Emerson Hotel. “He looked like a bird of prey—and then he would start to quote Shakespeare,” Schaefer told me years ago while I was writing his political biography. Pollack had been implicated in a murder (never convicted—or tried; he had friends in the court house).
So Schaefer turned his attention to Kovens. As it turns out, he had an advocate: Edgar Silver, a Pollack man who had gone over to Kovens (and who was among the throng that had beaten Schaefer in 1950). Silver had always been one of those political players who loved putting people together, making things happen, creating atmospheres. He knew Kovens was in the market for a council candidate to run in the 5th district.
“You ought to take a look at this guy I know,” Silver said to Kovens. “He ran for the House of Delegates. Clean-cut, hard-working.”
So Kovens walked up to Schaefer during one of those Sunday meetings.

“I want to see you,” he said. It must have sounded like an order.
“All right, yes sir,” Schaefer replied.
They met that night at Kovens’s house. As the Jewish leader of a mostly Jewish delegation to City Hall, Kovens wanted a non-Jew to run in the mostly Protestant southern precincts of the 5th. He thought he’d found his man.
Though Schaefer’s future was on the line during that first meeting at the boss’s house, he dared to give the imperious and impatient Kovens his terms. Kovens could have the political stuff, the little jobs, and the small favors. But Schaefer’s vote would be his own. He would vote the way he thought best. He just wanted the boss to know.
“He must have been laughing himself to death,” Schaefer said, recalling the moment years later.
The story gains credence from the boss himself. Edgar Silver recalls that Kovens called him the next day. “That’s a strange guy you’ve got there,” Kovens said. “He said he wouldn’t do anything he wouldn’t be proud of in church.”
Thus did William Donald Schaefer enter political life in Baltimore—and the state of Maryland—as Irv Kovens’s designated gentile. It was a fateful and fortuitous union.
“The word came down,” recalls state Senator George W. Della Jr., the son of a former senate president who had been beaten by a Kovens man. “All of a sudden doors opened.”
With Kovens backing him, Schaefer grew strong in the northern reaches of the 5th. They, too, had gotten the word.
“William Donald, William Donald,” the faithful chanted as they campaigned for him.
In time, everyone in Maryland would know him as William Donald Schaefer or Don or, most famously, Willie Don. He was the 5th District team’s top vote-getter in 1955. Name recognition was never a problem after that.
Kovens once observed that his team had some of the smartest, most talented politicians in the city. It was true. Neither he nor Pollack sent seat-warmers to the City Council. Determined as they were to control the political landscape, they felt accountable to their constituencies. They wanted talented people to represent them. And now, Kovens—though he could hardly have expected it—had given Baltimore and Maryland one of its most important and colorful political leaders.
Shy but nervy, Schaefer broke in at a time when machine politics had reached their high point in Baltimore. And his patron, Kovens, was the prime engine. Over the years, Kovens developed a kind of mocking affection for Schaefer, laughing at his election-year nerves. Knowing that outcomes were never in doubt for the machine, he chuckled at Schaefer’s moaning, “I’m-going-to-lose” approach to every campaign. Kovens called him “Shaky.” Schaefer, reverentially, called Kovens “Mr. Kovens” or “Big Chief.”
He marveled at Kovens’s aura.
“People came up to him like a honey pot,” Schaefer recalled. “He knew everyone. I’d walk along behind him. He’d be smoking his cigar and flicking the ashes back in my face. I didn’t care.”
Schaefer knew people would think he had sold his soul in exchange for Kovens’s backing. So he insisted over and over that Kovens had never asked him for anything. There was a hint of protesting too much in this, but no one ever proved otherwise.
What’s more, the relationship was not quite as one-sided as one might think. “Kovens blessed him, but he needed Schaefer as much as Schaefer needed him,” says Gene Raynor, Schaefer’s friend and former city and state elections chief.
In time, Schaefer would amass political cachet that exceeded the power of both Kovens and Pollack, nurturing support that gave him constituencies, both in the Democratic clubhouses and the network of community organizations that were then becoming more influential in the city.
“He was one of the first local politicians who ingratiated himself to the citizens associations,” explains former Mayor Thomas A. D’Alesandro III. “And they were very, very appreciative. He was building a new base of support in the precincts.”
As Schaefer amassed his own power and his career gathered momentum, there were those who said he didn’t need the boss anymore. He didn’t agree and he never shunned the man who got him started.
Kovens rewarded Schaefer’s loyalty in 1971, when he came back to Baltimore from Florida to help his protégé win the mayoralty. The political clubs had begun to slip by then. Big government had taken over the social welfare work which was once the exclusive province of the clubs—and television had begun to replace the legions of campaign workers.
“When TV came along, all of a sudden I’m in your living room. That ripped the old organizations apart,” says D’Alesandro. Political support of the sort D’Alesandro cultivated was less important after TV.
Kovens’s power, which had strong ties to the business community, continued to grow. He could raise the money for Shaky and Shaky could win with his broad array of supporters in the black, white, ethnic, and upper-class neighborhoods of the city.
“Schaefer developed a situation where he was a step [removed] from the political manipulations,” D’Alesandro says. “He left that to Kovens.”
After Schaefer became Mayor, it was Kovens who kept the City Council in line. Schaefer was free to think about the big picture and to find talented lieutenants who could make the big ideas happen. With Kovens lining up the votes for Schaefer’s building projects, Schaefer waved the wand of urban—and psychological—renewal over Baltimore’s marble steps, transforming the city into a tourist destination with a splendid waterside marketplace.
Kovens had built the platform. Schaefer became the personification of Baltimore, discovering in the process that he was something of an actor. He mugged it like Bert Lahr or Charlie Chaplin, dressed up like H. L. Mencken. He put Baltimore on the national and even the world map—famously donning an orange and yellow Victorian swimsuit and jumping into the new aquarium’s seal pool with the seals—to give a smokestack and steel town new panache. He instinctively seemed to know the right facial expressions and poses—whatever the event demanded.
“He was like the Wizard of Oz,” says Senator Della Jr. “He gave the city heart. He gave it courage.”
City Hall was his home. He had no other life. He always worked late.
U. S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, once Schaefer’s colleague in the City Council, says he could co-opt you—or “vaporize” you. She had been elected to block a highway then planned through various city neighborhoods. Schaefer wanted the project to proceed.
“He said, ‘Barb, you’re a great lady but I’m going to have to roll you,'” Mikulski recalls. “‘You kept your promise to the neighborhood. But you’re just a council lady.'” She lost her first effort to stop the road 17-to-3, but prevailed later, and Schaefer credited her with recognizing a potential disaster. The highway would have defaced the city.
“I didn’t see it. But she did,” he said, looking back this year.
“The amazing thing about him,” says Senator Della Jr., “I mean, he had Kovens—but he had this uncanny ability of surrounding himself with very talented people the likes of which haven’t gathered since.”
Uncanny, too, was the renaissance chemistry stirred in Kovens’s 5th Ward clubhouse. Another of its stalwarts, Marvin Mandel, rose to the governor’s office. He was there when Schaefer became the Mayor. Kovens would send emissaries to Annapolis with specific messages: Don needs a convention center. Don needs a World Trade Center. Don needs a subway. And Mandel would deliver. These buildings were, in a sense, monuments to the value of bosses and machines.
“Kovens, Mandel, Schaefer, and the Democratic Party were in perfect harmony. It all came together. It was just fortuitous for the city,” says Frank DeFilippo, a newspaper columnist, commentator, and former Mandel press secretary.
With Kovens’s backing, Schaefer never lost a race. In the 50 years that followed that first conversation, Schaefer ran for and was elected to the Baltimore City Council four times, president of the council once, mayor four times, governor of Maryland twice, and the state’s comptroller of the treasury twice. Had Kovens not died in 1989, Schaefer might well have served until the day he himself died—always and happily being little “Shaky” to Irv Kovens’s “Big Chief.”

In the twilight, from a distance, she still looks beautiful. With her fortress-like exterior, silverish-gray and augmented with pink terra cotta brick, she stands apart from the mostly muddy browns and other assorted earth-tones of her neighboring structures; dignified and distinctive, the color of a winter cloud at sunset.

The Belvedere first opened in winter a century ago, on December 14, 1903. She looked like a castle then, too, sitting majestically on the corner of Chase and North Charles. This was quite appropriate, because the Belvedere—or Hotel Belvedere, as she was initially named and as the carved stonework above her grand entrance still reads—played host to some of the most famous and influential people alive. This was once upon a time, when Baltimore was a cosmopolitan city that drew the world to its doorstep.

Photography by David Colwell.

Royalty and presidents. Movie stars and music idols. Sports heroes and global explorers. Gangsters and detectives. Novelists and newspapermen. Developers and financiers.

And with the famous came the fabulous—opulent fêtes that were the very definition of conspicuous consumption. And infamous, as well—murders, scandals, naked women roaming the halls.

This month marks the centennial anniversary of the Belvedere Hotel. “Belvedere” means “beautiful view” or “beautiful to see” in Italian. And, like that rare beautiful woman who has lived a century among the wealthy and the blessed and the elite, the Belvedere keeps many secrets.

“Meet me at the Belvedere
Come before the show
Meet me at the Belvedere
And see everyone you know
Dining with society in a cozy nook
Mixing with celebrities to take a second look…”
—“Meet Me at the Belvedere” by Victor Frenkil

In order to comprehend the magnitude of the Belvedere’s construction and opening, it helps to get an understanding of what a top-notch hotel meant to a city at the turn of the 20th century. It was essentially the equivalent of landing a professional sports team: It signaled to the world that you had arrived, you were a player, you were on the map.

For the upper crust of Baltimore, this type of hotel was an imperative, for two reasons. First—though in the early history of the country, hotels were often viewed as places of ill repute—by the turn of the century, an individual’s travel lodgings were an indication of his or her place on the ladder of success. If a city did not have a hotel in which the visiting elite could recline and look sublime, well, then, how wonderful could that city really be?

But even more important to Baltimore’s growing moneyed class, a plush and regal hotel was needed as a place for capitalist royalty to gather, have parties, dance, gossip, do business and—most of all—be seen and recognized as the rich, powerful, and beautiful people that they were. The construction of a luxury hotel was designed not only to show off the city, but its high society, the so-called “400” of Baltimore’s Blue Book, who gathered there on a regular basis.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the initial $1.7 million to buy the land and construct the Hotel Belvedere—a staggering amount of money for the time—was put up by four of Baltimore’s wealthiest families, including one name that still towers over the city, Alexander Brown, as well as the Parr, Harvey, and Perin families.

The architecture firm of J. Harleston Parker and Douglas H. Thomas Jr, which designed the original Alex. Brown & Sons building on Calvert and Baltimore streets in 1900, was tapped by the gang of four to outdo themselves, spend whatever it cost and create the greatest hotel in the world—something European, elegant, exquisite, majestic, worthy of Baltimore’s aristocracy. They chose a design both populist and regal in the Beaux-Arts style, a style shared by New York City’s legendary Plaza and St. Regis hotels.

Almost instantly, the hotel was a hit. When she opened on December 14, 1903, two weeks before Christmas, with virtually no advertising, the Hotel Belvedere was immediately established as the place to be seen, drawing, according to The Sun, “All of the season’s debutantes…with their own parties or as the guests of others. The main dining room and six private dining rooms were filled to capacity and it was estimated that over 1,000 people dined…that evening.”

Here is a short and far from complete list of guests who stayed at the Belvedere: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (often). Rudolph Valentino. Gloria Swanson. John D. Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie. World Heavyweight Champion boxers Diamond Jim Brady and Gentleman Jim Corbett. Ty Cobb. Jane Russell. Lady Astor. Will Rogers. Roy Rogers. Oscar Hammerstein. Cecil B. DeMille. Tom Mix. Clare Booth Luce. Al Jolson. Enrico Caruso. The Duke and Dutchess of Windsor. Groucho Marx. General Douglas MacArthur. Admirals Richard Byrd and Robert Peary. Tommy Dorsey. Cab Calloway. B.B. King. Kenny Rogers. F. Scott Fitzgerald (infamously). The Smothers Brothers. Tyrone Power. John Philip Sousa. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (separately). Jean Harlow. Jane Wyman. Henry Fonda. Al Pacino. Queen Marie of Romania. Every U.S. President from Teddy Roosevelt to JFK, then toss in Reagan for good measure. Bishop Desmond Tutu. Chiang Kai-Shek. Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop (together).

To the powerful—and those they attracted—the Belvedere was a seductress. She had the best martinis in town, the best chef, the best maitre’d. Songs were written about her. Motion pictures were shot inside her.

Oh, if her walls could only talk. But sadly, many of the Belvedere’s secrets are lost to time. For not only was the hotel a grand getaway for the rich and powerful, she was quite powerful herself, particularly at squelching stories that might paint the palace in a less than regal light.

From before the beginning, the hotel operators understood that if you courted the press, you could control the press. The day before the Belvedere opened, there was an exclusive tour for members of the media—and back then, the media was pretty much the city’s newspapers, which included The Sun (morning and evening editions), the Baltimore Star, and the Baltimore-American—followed by a free banquet, with European culinary delights like oysters on the half shell, potage Ambassadeur, filet of sole, tournedos of beef, and quails farci a l’Estoufade. As The Sun noted, “There are a lot of newspapermen who have never enjoyed a dinner like that, and never will.”

This hand in glove—or perhaps fork on plate—relationship between the Belvedere and the press lasted about 50 years.

“Whenever somebody did a story that did well by the Belvedere, you could go up there and have a dinner on the house,” says Jim Bready, who was a reporter and editor for the Sunpapers in the 1940s and ’50s. “It was in the days before codes of ethics were being formulated by newspapers.”

The Grand Ballroom in 1908.

The Grand Ballroom in 2003.

Bready says that all the key editors in town—a hard drinking lot—were sent huge containers of the Belvedere’s famous martinis on Christmas Eve. Christmas was a good time to do it, because it was the season of some of the hotel’s wildest—and most notorious—parties. One such party was thrown by F. Scott Fitzgerald in honor of his daughter, Scottie—presumably to make her feel better because her mother, Zelda, had recently been committed to Johns Hopkins psychiatric hospital. Instead, Fitzgerald got completely smashed and humiliated poor Scottie by dancing with all of her young friends, then suddenly sending everyone home so he could sit in the ballroom all by himself and continue to drink. This event was too much for even the newspapers to ignore, and Fitzgerald left town soon afterwards.

Yet, for the most part, the scandals were kept mum for the first half of the hotel’s life.

This cozy relationship all came crashing down in the 1950s, when The Sun exposed the “Belvedere and Ballpark Night,” an annual custom where the town’s reporters came to the hotel for free dinner and drinks, then got packed onto a bus for Memorial Stadium where they were ushered to box seats practically on top of the field.

“This went on for some years, until the morning Sun did a story exposing it on the first home local page,” Bready says. “The reason they gave was morality, trying to show the difference between [the ethics] of the morning Sun and the Evening Sun. Actually, the difference was that the morning Sun couldn’t go. They were working, putting out the next day’s paper. It was the Evening Sun that profited from the relationship.”

After the exposé, the papers began to report more legitimately on the hotel. But before then, much of what we know about the Belvedere is a tantalizing mixture of gossip, cobbled-together memory, and semi-documented fact.

We know that in March of 1904, “Mr. Belvedere”—19-year-old William Francis Riesner—was hired as a dishwasher in Hotel Belvedere’s kitchen and began his rapid rise through the ranks. Stubby yet suave, well-mannered and always impeccably dressed, Francis—as he singularly came to be known—was named maitre d’hotel in 1919, a position he commanded for nearly 30 years until his death in 1949.

We know that from June 25 to July 2, 1912, more than 600 guests registered at the Belvedere for the Democratic National Convention. The severely overbooked hotel set up cots in hallways to accommodate the party faithful, who nominated the winning Presidential ticket of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Marshall.

We know that on October 20, 1926, Queen Marie of Romania visited. And, while there have been literally thousands of grand galas at the Belvedere, this was undoubtedly the greatest. All of Baltimore society attended, as a canopy of royal purple was draped over the hotel’s entrance. The Queen’s suite was covered with silk and decorated with Louis XIV pieces, the Ballroom filled with hundreds of the Queen’s most favorite, fragrant roses. Francis even imported an ancient Italian throne and placed it upon a pedestal for the Queen to sit, and gold china stored in the Belvedere basement for over 20 years was hauled out (and partially stolen afterwards).

Clockwise from left: Margaret and Victor Frenkil at a fundraising party in the late-1950s; The Duchess and Duke of Windsor in the Windsor Suite of the Sheraton Belvedere, 1957.

Queen Marie of Romania in War Memorial Plaza after her luncheon at the Belvedere, October 20, 1926 ; Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, December 28, 1940.

We know that an aged and legless Sarah Bernhardt serenaded hotel guests in the lobby as she was carried into the hotel by sedan chair; that in 1946, four-star Chef Joseph Vallegant stood up to the Mob, which was robbing the hotel blind, and lived to tell the tale; we know of the 1913 night when French and Assyrian chefs had a huge screaming match over whether to put rose or carnation petals in the finger bowls (!) and the entire kitchen staff walked out, with more than 500 diners waiting to eat; we know of the day a woman guest complained about the man screaming next door and it turned out to be Enrico Caruso, practicing for his opera gig at the Lyric; and of the tragic evening in May 1937, when an overloaded hotel elevator went out of control, crushing the legs of two 21-year-old girls, caught between shaft and ledge, who were then trampled by the other panicked passengers on the way out.

But mostly we know about the parties: parties with exotic animals like camels and kangaroos. Hawaiian parties with giant four-foot clam shells, countless hula dancers, and monkeys, one party that even climaxed with a simulated Pacific typhoon (and ended with a wet bang when clean-up crews dumped the Hawaiian pond off the roof and inadvertently drenched the guests who were leaving below). Confederate parties, where the hotel flew the “stars and bars” flag on its marquee and decorated the lobby with portraits of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Today, when the hotel is quiet, you can swear you still hear the tinkling of champagne glasses and the distant strains of Tommy Dorsey.

The parties had to end eventually. And one sobering fact about the Belvedere is this: She never earned her keep. The hotel has had 18 owners in its 100 years, but it looks like only one—the Sheraton Corporation—walked away with any money in its pocket. She is a regal beauty, but she is high maintenance.

While the city’s high rolling forefathers originally instructed Parker and Thomas to spare no expense in building the place, they soon realized what that actually meant, and the Hotel Belvedere was up for sale even before it was completed. Slightly over two years after it opened, the property went into receivership in February 1906, and was purchased by the Maryland Trust Company for $1,500,000—a cool quarter million bucks less than it cost to build.

Hotel Belvedere was next purchased by Union Trust Company, who couldn’t make a go of it, and in 1915, with the first World War putting a damper on travel, the Belvedere went into receivership again. This time, it didn’t sell until 1917, when a Virginia hotel magnate and former circus clown “Colonel” Charles Consolvo bought the Belvedere for the rock-bottom price of $450,000.

Consolvo reorganized the place and took over managing it himself, and by the early ’20s, Hotel Belvedere was roaring. He moved into the hotel with his free-spirited wife and took over the entire second floor for their living area, where Mrs. Consolvo often scandalized visitors by walking around nude.

Consolvo ran the property at a profit—enough so that he could acquire the plush Jefferson Hotel in Richmond for $1.2 million—until Prohibition hit. Though he surreptitiously ran booze out of the place—bottled whiskey with an audacious Belvedere label, no less, and installed the now-notorious owls in the Owl Bar, which winked at patrons when it was safe to order the hard stuff —profits declined until the Depression, when Consolvo was forced to declare bankruptcy.

In 1942, a group of rich Baltimoreans—including theater patron Morris Mechanic and John McFee Mowbray—bought the hotel from the bank for an undisclosed sum. They held onto it for four years, through the end of the war, then sold it to the Sheraton Hotel Corporation in 1946, an arranged corporate marriage that caused her name to become the hyphenated Sheraton-Belvedere. It might have been a decision made because of money instead of love, but it worked. The next 22 years were the hotel’s most financially stable, though the following five would be her absolute worst.

It was during her time as the Sheraton-Belvedere that the hotel experienced her finest hour. It lasted about a month. Baltimore in 1954 was a racially polarized city. Segregation was the norm, and hotels—especially upscale hotels—were no exception. But the Sheraton-Belvedere wanted to set new rules. One week before Christmas, 1954, Sheraton Corporate hotel manager Albert Fox made a bold decision to welcome African-American guests to Hotel Belvedere. Considering the holiday season, it certainly seemed the Christian thing to do, and Fox later told The Sun that business at the hotel increased significantly.

The world did not stop, but the Baltimore old guard was apparently aghast. Though the particulars are a bit foggy, it seems the Baltimore Hotel Association threatened to throw the Belvedere out of its membership. It was made clear that in Baltimore, hospitality should remain a monochromatic enterprise.

Officially, Fox told The Sun he received no threats or intimidation, but added, revealingly, “If you’re going to belong to an organization…you have to comply with the rules of that organization.”

The Sheraton-Belvedere reluctantly acceded to the wishes of the Baltimore Hotel Association and returned to refusing Black patrons on January 17, 1955.

As for the newspapers, well, none of them covered the desegregation story at the time. It took until March, 1955, almost two months later, when Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin finally made an issue out of it and the media couldn’t bury their heads in their martinis any more. McKeldin slammed the Baltimore Hotel Association following a report from the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations that examined what happened at the Sheraton-Belvedere the holiday season prior.

The Commission’s report got a one-column, thirteen-paragraph story in The Sun, buried inside the paper.

When the Sheraton Corporation was sold to ITT in 1968, the Belvedere began a rapid downward spiral. Less than three months later, the Belvedere itself was sold by its new parents in an 18 hotel package deal to Wellington Associates. Wellington promptly resold the hotel to Gotham Hotels, Inc., who ran it into the ground and closed it.

She then reached her lowest point in September 1971, when, for a brief but horrible period, the Belvedere was leased by Gotham to the shady Snowden Corporation, which was headed by a Dr. Millard G. Roberts, a rather notorious businessman who would reportedly do anything for a buck.

Roberts’ new scheme was to turn the grande olde dame of Baltimore into a low-rent communal dorm for Baltimore students at 35 area colleges and universities. It was like Audrey Hepburn marrying Adam Sandler. Or worse.

Drug dealing was rampant. There were rapes. Trash pickup was irregular and bags of garbage built up in the halls, until windows of the ballrooms were broken out and debris discarded that way. Fire extinguisher fights flooded hallways and dripped down to the floors below. The power was turned off. Then on. Then back off.

In late January, 1972, Baltimore City closed the Belvedere for extensive code violations and the students were evicted.

Gotham defaulted on the mortgage payments for the Belvedere in August, 1972, and the hotel was put up for auction yet again. There was one bidder: Monumental Life Insurance Company, which sat across Chase Street. They paid $700,000 for the property, less than half what it cost to build 70 years earlier.

It took developer Victor Frenkil to save the Belvedere, and, in a way, it took the Belvedere to save Victor Frenkil. If, originally, Hotel Belvedere was built for Baltimore society to impress the rest of the world, Victor Frenkil bought the Belvedere to impress Baltimore society.

“The Belvedere was sacred to old Baltimore,” says Edward Hanrahan, a long-time friend of Frenkil’s who handled PR for the hotel throughout the late ’70s and ’80s. “Victor was never a part of old Baltimore society but he thought this might be a way to make them like him more, and it did. Not as much as they should have liked him, but it made a difference.”

Though terms weren’t initially released, it was later reported that Frenkil bought the Belvedere in 1976 for $650,000. He then secured a series of controversial loans from the city with the support of then-mayor William Donald Schaefer, as he sought to rebuild the place, first making it into apartments, then, at the behest of the city, turning it back into a hotel, then trying for a hotel and apartment mix.

Frenkil had a grand vision for the Belvedere, some of which got done, and some didn’t. He turned the 13th floor cloakroom into Top of the Belvedere (now The 13th Floor) bar. He officially named the bar at the Belvedere the Owl Bar, and brought back the owls, which had been stolen (although Hanrahan now claims to have had them all the time and the entire “hunt for the owls”—which was a huge story at the time—was an elaborate PR stunt that worked fabulously). He built the garage next door, which became a cash cow for him. He installed a swimming pool and racquetball court on the second floor, getting rid of some of the offices. The downstairs coffee shop was turned into shops and offices.

The Owl Bar in the early 1950s (then called the Falstaff Room)

The Owl Bar in 2003.

Other things he was never able to pull off. There were plans to put a glass elevator on the backside of the building that would take guests from the parking garage to the Top of the Belvedere. Expanding the marble staircase was cost prohibitive, so the entire grand marble staircase of the hotel was destroyed—Frenkil engraved little square blocks of it and gave them away as paperweights.

But he made a good go of it, spending millions of his own dollars, but the loans from the city kept coming as the red ink covered more and more sheets of paper. When Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer moved on to the governor’s office, a new administration was not nearly so amiable to Frenkil or the Belvedere. He was forced to sell it in 1991.

His son, Victor Frenkil Jr., who remained in the Baltimore area and now works for Jarvis Steel & Lumber in Brooklyn, removed the owls from the Owl Bar for his dad to keep.

“I took the owls when my father lost the hotel,” says Frenkil Jr., 66. “They were damaged. They were bruised. I had them restored and gave them to my dad as a present, for the memories. He kept them less than a week and then said. ‘These things don’t belong here. They belong to the Belvedere. They belong there.’”

“This whole Belvedere thing with my dad made no sense whatsoever,” Frenkil says.“It was a labor of love, the numbers didn’t make no sense. He could have just torn the building down and built something cheaper. But he didn’t because he loved it.”

Frenkil Sr. died in June of 1998 at the age of 90. Not long before, Schaefer and other friends held a tribute to him at the Belvedere, where he sang the song he wrote, “Meet Me at the Belvedere,” accompanied by piano, one last time.

Of course, no legend of a great hotel would be complete without murders, suicides, and a ghost or two, and the Belvedere does not disappoint.

Being the tallest building in Baltimore for many years, the Belvedere inadvertently welcomed several depressed guests whose sole purpose was to take an early exit through an upper floor window. The most notable of these, according to a 1970s issue of this very magazine, went streaking downward past the living room window of Albert Fox, the manager of Hotel Belvedere at the time.

That story is a fact, but the hotel’s first murder and its ghost may both be legend, since nothing can be found in the newspapers of the time—though from what has been learned about the period’s selective reporting, its absence could hardly lead you to conclude a killing didn’t take place.

Two men—Joe Otterbein, who worked at the Belvedere in the late ’80s, during its last gasp as a great hotel, and Tom Hamrick, the current general manager of the Owl Bar and The 13th Floor bar—both recount hotel oral history that tells of a Baltimore woman in the 1920s or ’30s who caught her husband dancing with his mistress in one of Hotel Belvedere’s ballrooms and shot him dead. His ghost, it is rumored, still haunts the ballrooms of the 12th floor, but it only bothers women.

“None of the girls ever wanted to work up there by themselves,” Otterbein says. “Once in a while, people who worked up there would swear that glasses would fall to the floor and break with nobody nearby, or they’d put something down and a little while later it would be somewhere else.”

As for the second murder at the Belvedere there is no doubt, and its story is pretty squalid. During a period when the hotel was abandoned, Samuel Shapiro, owner of a number of parking lots around the city—including the garage next to the Belvedere—and a two-time gadfly candidate for Baltimore mayor, was shot dead in the lobby of the hotel by a former employee. Shapiro’s body was dragged to the Owl Bar and stuffed into a trunk that ultimately proved to be too small. The killers searched the hotel until they found a larger crate on the 11th floor which accommodated the corpse. (In an odd postscript, the convicted murderer, Douglas Arey, who was sentenced to life, was later the successful bidder for a lunch with then-Governor William Donald Schaefer during a benefit auction for the Center Stage. Schaefer refused, incidentally.)

Finally, near the end of Victor Frenkil’s ownership in the late 1980s, a maintenance man who lived in the building’s sub-basement near the building’s belching furnace, was killed by a former employee he’d fired the day before.

There were also at least two fictitious murders at the Belvedere. During its seven-year run, Barry Levinson and David Simon’s NBC crime series Homicide visited the Belvedere three times: Twice for killings—the first time a prestigious chef, the second a lowly maid—but also for the wedding reception of Detective Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson).

“Meet me at the Belvedere
Right after the show
Meet me at the Belvedere
It’s the last place to go… ”

In the daylight, up close, she shows her age. Standing on a Chase Street sidewalk on a wispy fall afternoon, a visitor needs not look closely to see the splotchy watermarks, like age spots, that garnish her façade. Or the small winding cracks through her stone, the wrinkles that come with changing fortune and time, which are covered up with paint and other forms of a mason’s masking make-up.

Inside the lobby, no longer bustling and now colored with a near-sepia tone of melancholy memory, there is the whiff of mildew. Off to the left and past walls of mostly dead celebrities’ pictures, before you reach the Owl Bar, The Palm Room is plagued by water leaks, though the pool that was installed above during the reign of Victor Frenkil now lies drained.

Upstairs, on the 13th floor and inside the bar of the same name, windows that still provide a breathtaking panorama of the city also reveal that the dormers a floor below are badly in need of paint, chipped and streaked with rust. Still, the view remains the best in the city.

A century has passed and her best days are behind her, though her worst, hopefully, are too.

Today, as a mixed-use condominium, the Belvedere serves many masters. Residents can purchase individual living units, efficiencies or one-or two-bedrooms, ranging in price from about $60,000 to $300,000. The Owl Bar, party rooms, dining rooms, ballrooms, and 13th Floor bar are owned by the canny and flamboyant businessman Tom Stuehler and his catering firm La Fontaine Bleu. It is Stuehler who largely deserves to be credited for keeping the property functioning as a quality Baltimore presence. Finally, there are the restaurants and shops in the basement, including a pretty good sushi bar. But the days of celebrity and fame are behind her, probably forever. All the hot hotels are down by the water now, chasing tourists’ green near the brine.

And yet…she still stands. She still has her past, her history, her memories, entwined with the city’s, tangled to a time that must not be forgotten, knotted tight to its greatness. She still has her aura. She is still worthy of her name. She is the Belvedere.

“Meet me at the Belvedere
And see everyone you know
Drinking with society
Sipping with celebrities
To take a second look
They’ll drink a toast to you
At the Belvedere
You are who’s who!
Let’s go to the Belvedere…”