One morning just after dawn early last November, a small group of kayakers gathered at the Tide Point dock, outside the Under Armor headquarters on Locust Point, with hats pulled down and coffee in hand to ward off the chill. Rob Bennett unlocked the metal box that held the Canton Kayak Club’s life jackets, then did the same for the cables that wound around the club’s kayaks, stacked on racks in brightly colored, jigsaw fashion. The kayakers lowered the boats into the water, then lowered themselves into the shallow cockpits, grabbed their paddles and pushed off into the harbor.

Soon Bennett, a communications professor who lives in Federal Hill and kayaks about four times a week, was leading the way, paddling out into the water as squadrons of geese networked the sky and the morning sunlight sent rivers of gold and silver across the Inner Harbor. They paddled past a massive cargo ship, the Ravenna, docked at the Domino Sugar Refinery, past the Rusty Scupper restaurant and the adjacent marina, skirted the aquarium and the World War II-era Torsk submarine, then worked their way back across the harbor.

The city rose around them, an old port town seen from maybe its best vantage: from the water.

The Canton Kayak Club was launched, both figuratively and literally, almost 25 years ago, in 1999. Friends and fellow recreational kayakers Charlie Gjerde and Bill Struever came up with the idea of doing their harbor commute on the water rather than around it.

“Bill was on one side of the harbor and I was on the other,” says Gjerde, a local restaurateur who grew up kayaking on Deep Creek Lake with his brother Spike, also a restaurateur. So the pair bought some kayaks and put in a few docking stations—in Canton, Tide Point, and Fells—and started to spread the word. “It was just a good idea,” Gjerde says. “It was super cheap; you had access. We just made it up as we went along.”

Gjerde and Struever, a real estate developer known for his remaking of Baltimore’s industrial port, built up a membership base, turned the club into a nonprofit, and implemented a training program, with Gjerde doing the training, though first he had to figure out how to do it.

“I’m a restaurant guy,” he says, “I literally was looking up ‘kayak training’ on YouTube.” Gjerde loved being on the water in the middle of the city. “Being on a little kayak right on the water, cruising around these huge ships,” he says. “I thought that was the coolest part.”

Two years later, when NPR did a story about the club—Gjerde took longtime NPR host Brian Naylor out on the water, the splash of oars forming the soundtrack of the piece—there were about 70 members. At the end of the 2022 season, which runs from May to late October or early November, the number had grown to 700. That 700 includes people of all demographics, whose ages run the gamut from just-turned-18 to over 90.

 

“IT WAS JUST A GOOD IDEA. IT WAS SUPER CHEAP…WE JUST MADE IT UP AS WE WENT ALONG.”

 

 

Not much has changed in the quarter century since the club began, though more members mean there are more kayaks and more docks. The basic premise is the same: a community of recreational kayakers who, for a small annual membership fee ($165 for new members, $135 for returning members), get access to boats, gear, and training, and to the water itself. Though the club may have started as way to commute, these days it’s used by recreational kayakers who go out singly or in groups of varying sizes.

“We fit between the [boat] rental companies and individual kayak ownership,” says Ray Scurr, an auditor for T. Rowe Price who joined the club 10 years ago and has been its president for the last six. “For many people, particularly city-dwellers who don’t have space to store a kayak, it makes perfect sense,” says Scurr.

The club remains entirely run by volunteers. Overall, the club has a very small footprint, with no offices or clubhouse, only a series of kayak racks set up on various docks. The Canton dock for which the club was named closed years ago, but the original docks on Fells Point and Locust Point are still in place, as well as newer docks in Dundalk, Essex Island, Pasadena, Chesapeake Harbour in Annapolis, and Delta, PA.

If you drive an hour north of Baltimore, down a winding, tree-lined road that eventually dead-ends at the Susquehanna River, two racks of kayaks sit on the edge of a parking lot fronting the water. You’re in Delta—the farthest afield of the Canton Kayak Club’s half-dozen docks—a few miles over the Pennsylvania state line, and a few hundred yards from Starrk Moon Kayaks, which Brad Nelson has owned for over 35 years.

Nelson’s kayak shop is built into his home, itself a hodgepodge wood cabin decorated with art, patio umbrellas, weather vanes, and, in his adjacent shop and outside, kayaks—he has about 180 in total—lined up around the house like spokes on a massive wheel. A trailer across the road houses the paddles and life jackets that the club uses, and is buttressed by more kayaks. Nelson has been involved with the Canton Kayak Club for most of its history, selling it boats as well as providing upkeep on the small fleet. Nelson has also been a member for years, and kayaked himself until a non-kayaking accident a few years ago took one of his legs. He now provides all the club’s 120 or so kayaks, mostly 14-to-17-foot Venture and P&H sea kayaks, made in England, including a few tandem boats.

Despite, or maybe because of, his remote location, Nelson does quite a lot of business selling kayaks to recreational enthusiasts as well as white-water boaters, catering to people who come from West Virginia, northern Virginia, and D.C., where white-water kayaking is particularly popular. Maybe it’s because Nelson is an engaging guy, or because his shop is in such a remote location, but people tend to talk to him. “I get stories here that I shouldn’t even be hearing,” he says with a laugh, “on a dead-end road in southeastern York County.”

 

“[KAYAKING] BREAKS DOWN THE DIVIDE BETWEEN CITY AND COUNTY. IT ALLOWS PEOPLE TO EXPLORE AREAS THAT THEY’VE NEVER BEEN TO.”

 

One morning last fall, a group of Baltimore kayakers parked their cars in the Delta lot and gathered at the dock, helping each other swing the boats down from the racks— they’d already picked up paddles and life jackets from Nelson’s trailer. Some had kayaked together before, some were strangers, meeting for the first time and trading stories about their time on the water and what had drawn them to kayaking. The outing had been set up on Slack, the instant messaging site the Canton club uses as a message board.

Soon the kayaks were out in the water, the group paddling in a convoy across the river and weaving around the islands, painted in fall colors, birds threading through the clouds. Conversations rose and fell between the boats, punctuated by the splash of the paddles. After a few hours, they pulled the kayaks up on a secluded beach on one of the islands and ate packed lunches, sharing sandwiches and taking pictures of the scenery and each other. Then everyone relaunched the boats and paddled around more islands, crossing back across the Susquehanna, then heading up one of the tributary creeks as far as the water would let them, navigating around reefs and rocks and branches. Eventually the group headed back to the dock, restacked the kayaks on the racks, said goodbyes, returned the gear, and drove back to the city.

Delta is the most rural, but also one of the most longstanding of the Canton Kayak Club’s docks outside the city. In general, dock locations shift every so often, depending on the relationship of the owners of the various properties to the club, which leases the sites, mostly on a yearly basis. Until recently, the club maintained a dock at Nick’s Fish House, the popular Port Covington seafood restaurant, which has an adjacent marina where the club housed its boats. The lease wasn’t renewed at the end of the 2022 season, after Nick’s changed ownership. A rack location at Loch Raven Reservoir closed in 2020. But as one dock closes, another opens. In 2019, Scurr worked to open a dock at Chesapeake Harbour, an Annapolis gated community, and the next year another at Homeport Farm in an Anne Arundel County park; the most recent dock, at Downs Park in Pasadena, was established in 2021.

“That’s always been the challenge,” says Scurr of finding water access for the club’s kayaks. “Originally it was just two or three locations down at the Inner Harbor. And now it’s grown to provide amenities in Baltimore County and beyond. The goal is to offer a variety of locations for members to explore. Right now, the vast majority of our members are residents of Baltimore City. But it doesn’t have to be that way.” Scurr is actively looking to find dock locations in Cherry Hill. “They’re so close to the water,” he says. “It could make sense to have a rack in Middle Branch; it would be a wonderful amenity.” He’d also like to expand more beyond Baltimore.

“[Kayaking] breaks down the divide between city and county,” Scurr says. “It allows people to explore and to go to areas that they’ve never been to.”

Baltimore City Recreation and Parks has historically offered once-a-week summer kayaking from Middle Branch Park and the Science Center at the Inner Harbor. However, even though Baltimore is one of the oldest ports in this country, a city built by and for ship-builders, dockworkers, crabbers, and fishermen, many of its current residents don’t get out on the water.

“People should be able to do this activity and get on the water,” says Scurr, “and small crafts are the lowest-cost way to do that. It gives you a different perspective. It’s kind of like reclaiming our water.”

If Scurr sounds a bit like he’s proselytizing, that’s because he is. Get him talking, and he’ll stress not only the physical benefits of kayaking, but also its emotional and psychological benefits. “It’s an ideal vehicle to reach people; it can bring people together. There’s a low degree of stress, most times—as long as you pay attention to the weather.”

And unlike, say, sailing, kayaking is a gateway sport, without any particular prior knowledge or too much physical strength necessary. The club requires a three-hour orientation session, which goes over basic skills as well as safety. There’s also an additional life-saving class that members can take through the club to qualify them as club leaders.

Rob Bennett, the Federal Hill professor, likes the convenience of having the Locust Point dock so close to where he lives. “The ease of not having to get your own paddle, your own life jacket, your own boat,” he says of why he joined the club. “And it’s within a mile of the house.”

Bennett joined in 2022 and was soon kayaking three to four times a week, mostly early in the mornings before he went to work. Through Slack, he’d arrange for a few fellow kayakers to join him most days, enjoying the camaraderie and the chance to chat across the water as they paddled. In the off-season, he meets his fellow kayakers for coffee every few weeks. (The club also hosts occasional gatherings, often at Fells Point taverns, to keep in touch during the winter months.)

Bennett was out on the water on the November morning of what turned out to be the last day of the 2022 season—an afternoon storm was rolling in, bringing squalls and temperatures that would plunge the water down below 60 degrees. Scurr would later visit the docks and change the combinations on all the locks, thereby ensuring that everyone would be off the water until he reset them in the spring.

Out on the Inner Harbor shortly after dawn that last morning, Bennett had paddled around the marina, waving to the folks on the Water Taxi crossing the Inner Harbor.

“Good to see my yacht is still there,” he joked, nodding to someone’s fancy sailboat as he skirted the boats in the marina.

Seagulls moved around the sky as it grew lighter, some coming to rest on the racks of kayaks at the dilapidated Fells Point dock, one of the oldest of the club’s docks, which is finally slated to be replaced later this year. The paddles dipped in unison, the splashes alternating with the cries of the gulls. The kayaks turned into the sunrise, then made for the other side of the harbor, smoke from the Domino stacks merging into the skyline, the reds and blues and yellows of the boats like nautical flags above the waves.

It was a 52-foot, 10-ton object of controversy, curiosity, and for the most part, derision, when it was installed in front of Penn Station in 2004. A Baltimore Sun editorial described the aluminum, five-story Male/Female work at the time of its placement in the city-owned plaza south of the station as “oversized, underdressed and woefully out of place.”

Sun columnist Dan Rodricks wrote that artist Jonathan Borofsky’s intersecting male and female silhouettes resembled the robot Gort from the sci-fi, horror movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. A local cabbie, who regularly picked up fares at the station, called it “an abomination” in one story. Several times, City Paper readers voted the massive sculpture—a $750,000 donation from the Municipal Arts Society— Baltimore’s “Best Eyesore.”

Almost immediately, it prompted chatter about moving it from its prominent position outside the 1911-built Beaux-Arts style station.

And now, oddly enough, just as the city seems to have finally grown accustomed to it, the fate of long-controversial Male/Female may be in doubt.

In order to handle the new generation of high-speed Acela trains, as well as the expectation of more passengers in coming years, Amtrak has pledged a $90 million overhaul of Penn Station. Those plans include a transformation of the historic station into a more pedestrian, bicycle, bus, and cab-friendly transit hub—and, if developers can raise more funds—a new mixed-use development in the surrounding area.

No official has said the giant sculpture needs to be moved to remake Penn Station. No one has indicated it will stay. There is simply is no sight of the 52-foot statue in current renderings and maps. Bill Struever, CEO of Cross Street Partners, one of the developers and planners on the Amtrak project, noted in an email that indeed the sculpture had engendered strong feelings over the years. He also stated he “is staying agnostic on the statue.” Ultimately, Struever says, he expects a resolution on the development of the south station plaza—and thus the statue—will grow out of a community planning process.

The current working proposal calls for moving the taxi/drop-off area to Charles and St. Paul streets, which will serve a new Lanvale Street rail concourse on the north side of the station. That plan, Struever says, creates an opportunity to rebuild the south station plaza into a more pedestrian friendly space with the potential for events and programming.

In the meantime, however, the statue has grown on at least some Baltimoreans over the last few years. As Baltimore magazine contributor Ed Gunts noted in a short piece in 2015, one early defender of the Male/Female statue was Bill Griffith, creator of the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip, in which the sculpture has appeared. John Waters has said he likes it, too. Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum, noted several years ago that even “The Eiffel Tower was detested” when it went up.

Asked again last week about the statue, Hoffberger said she wished “there was something that was more in tune with the station’s history as a link that gave homage.”

“It’s there and I think there are people that love it,” she says. “I don’t know how thematically it was decided on. There’s a bigger issue—the front of Penn Station is really historic and iconic to Baltimore,” adding the structure may be obscuring that. “I’m very big on preserving older architecture particularly of iconic sites.”

Baltimore architect and artist Jerome Gray said he believes the size of the statue overwhelmed city viewers at first, but since its installation people have become accustomed to it. He added the sculpture’s provocative intersection of the male and female forms—and its colorful, single, pulsating heart, widely visible at night—personally appeals. “I love weird things,” he says. “And I like anything that challenges you. In that way, it’s great. It makes you think.” (Initially, the sculpture’s beating heart was to be red, but it was switched to blue-magenta at the city’s request out of concerns the color red would be seen as a reminder of the city’s tragic homicide rate.)

Gray adds that it’s not unprecedented for the city to move works of art. The Orpheus statute, for example, at Fort McHenry was shifted from its original location. Others around Druid Hill Park have been moved in the past.

In 2015, City Paper contributor Michael Farley called the statue an “accidental monument to a consideration (or lack thereof) of gender identity and sex that’s distinctly Baltimorean.” He nominated it “the kinkiest artwork” in the city.

 

Borofsky, for what it’s worth, never liked to comment too much about the themes in his own work, preferring to leave it for the viewer’s interpretation. His public projects, including other large scale human forms, can be found around the world.

Eli Pousson, formerly of Baltimore Heritage, moved to the city a few years after the installation of the statue, but quickly became aware of the criticism of work. “It was abstract, difficult to categorize in terms of explicit meaning,” Pousson says. “It wasn’t your normal, marble famous guy. It plays with the [traditional] masculine and feminine forms, which also probably invited some of that response.” It’s interesting, Pousson continues, that today more people seem to respond positively to the statue as gender, sex, and queer identities and norms evolve in the eyes of society.

“Personally, I’m a fan,” Pousson says. “I’d suggest rather than spending money to take down public art, the city and developers use the money to put up more public art.”

Citing a pledged $90 million in funding from Amtrak and public support from Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, developers with Beatty Development Group, Cross Street Partners, and Penn Station Partners presented their vision for transforming the area surrounding Penn Station and Station North at a public meeting Tuesday.

As the eighth busiest station in the Amtrak system, developers see the area as an increasingly vibrant one that deserves the type of amenities on par with the attention and foot traffic it’s getting. The pledge from Amtrak will be used to add new platforms for riders as well as retail and restaurant space. No tenants have been announced, but the hope is to keep things local. Another top priority is maintaining the integrity of the building and preserving its history, while also implementing long-clamored-for upgrades.

“When you think about adaptive reuse projects, you can really create a strong sense of place and ambience,” says John Renner, Cross Street Partners’ vice president of development. “That would be really cool.”

Developers gave an update on their progress since the first public information session last year used to gather community input. Plans announced include a new connection from Lanvale Street to the south of the station, concourses, and additional buildings located on surrounding parking lots that have been neglected. If things go as planned, this type of growth could stimulate new residential and office space as the area becomes more attractive and frequented.

They cautioned, though, that there is still an estimated $400 to $600 million of funding that will be needed to fulfill this vision. That will be achieved through grants, Opportunity Zone Funding, and tax credits. Bill Struever of Cross Street Partners noted that a project like this will require a local, state, and federal effort. “We want to maximize opportunities in Station North,” Struever says.

Throughout the presentation, speakers used Denver’s Union Station as an example. It underwent a massive transformation itself, turning into a food hall and a gathering hub for those in the city—buttressed by $500 million at the city, state, and federal levels. However, Baltimore runs far more trains. In fact, the impetus for the Amtrak money is an increase in train service throughout the northeast corridor. Essentially, where the focus in Denver was less centered on the transportation aspect by nature, plans in Baltimore are more holistic.

“Station North is full of activity,” Struever says. “It just doesn’t have a lot of places yet. We want to really take advantage and build the ecosystem here.”

There is obvious interest from Batlimoreans when it comes to what the finished product will end up looking like—should this vision be fulfilled. The meeting was at full capacity, and attendees were encouraged to leave notes with suggestions for things they’d like to see that would keep them coming back.

“Right now the streetscape is not very inviting,” says Ryan McAlpine, a transportation planner and Remington resident who’s lived in Baltimore for 11 years. “It doesn’t really lend itself to people wanting to spend time there. There are things that could be done to reverse that.”

McAlpine says he is encouraged by what was discussed Tuesday, but that there is still a lot of work to do. This is not a project that will be fully realized next year or the year after—rather, this meeting, and a subsequent one set to be held in late fall, will establish just how and when concrete action can begin to move forward.

“This is going to be huge for this city,” Struever says. “There’s all this great stuff happening around us and we’re really there to help knit it together, build, and make it great.”

Bill Struever is standing inside the belly of a beast. For nearly a century, this massive 85,000-square-foot brick complex in East Baltimore was home to one of the most prolific lithographic printing companies in the world.

In its heyday, A. Hoen & Co. produced National Geographic maps, Buffalo Bill Cody posters, Dr. Seuss books, and Topps baseball cards. But it’s been shuttered since 1981, slowly crumbling over the past four decades like much of the surrounding neighborhood in the distressed area north of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and “north of the tracks” (read: wrong side to investors) where Amtrak rolls into town. Struever, however, is in his element.

“We’ve unearthed some of the old lithograph stones,” says the rumpled, 67-year-old developer, whose company, Cross Street Partners, is leading the long-hoped-for rehabilitation of the abandoned Hoen factory, which consumes an entire city block between East Biddle and East Chase.

Struever, on his way to a meeting in rolled-up jeans and a plaid workshirt, earned a degree in urban anthropology at Brown University and a master electrician’s license on the side. To his credit—and Baltimore’s benefit—he has always paid as much attention to the history and details of the buildings he’s repurposed as the construction, design, and financing process. He notes, for example, the relief sculpture in honor of Alois Senefelder, the inventor of the lithograph process, and the Latin words, Saxa Loquuntur—“the stones tell”—above the Hoen plant entrance.

But more than anything, it’s the reimagining of urban neighborhoods that animates him. He read acclaimed New York journalist, activist, and author Jane Jacobs’ book in college—she’d helped save lower Manhattan from urban highway destruction—and it became his Bible.

“You look out the window and realize Hopkins and the Henderson-Hopkins School [the first new school in the area in more than two decades] and the new Eager Park townhomes and apartments are just down the street,” says Struever, whose enthusiasm is both genuine, and, like any great salesman, contagious. “The American Brewery [home to nonprofit Humanim today] is a few blocks away, and there’s The Food Hub in the old Eastern Pumping Station on Oliver Street.”

Both the redevelopment of the wild-looking, late-19th-century American Brewery building—its central tower housed a 10,000-bushel grain elevator—and the Eastern Pumping Station are Struever partnership efforts. “To me, this is as exciting as anything we’ve ever done.” Which is saying something.

Practically everything Baltimoreans love about the city’s repurposed built environment—Canton Cove and the Can Company factory, Cross Street Market, Belvedere Square, the Tindeco and Bond Street wharfs, Stieff Silver in Hampden, Under Armour’s headquarters in the former detergent plant at Tide Point, the Clipper Mill complex, even the winking neon Mr. Boh atop Brewers Hill—Struever played a major hand in developing.

“When people ride Amtrak through East Baltimore, coming to the city for the first time,” says Struever, optimistic as ever, “they are going to see a transformation from the old sets of The Wire.”

After years spent digging out from his company’s collapse in the wake of the global financial meltdown in 2007, the visionary developer is now back in the fray with adaptive reuse projects in East and West Baltimore—a dramatic geographic shift in focus from the “white L” to the city’s historically redlined “black butterfly.”

“[People] are going to see a transformation from the old sets of The Wire.”

Mary Ellen Hayward met then 25-year-old Bill Struever in the summer of 1977, shortly after finishing her doctorate in American Studies. He was rehabbing rowhouses in Federal Hill and had already reached out to the Maryland Historic Trust about a research project around the homes and buildings in the Federal Hill National Register Historic District. She tapped on the door of his small office tucked in a recently rehabbed house on East Cross Street and inquired about a job.

“‘Can you write?’ was his first question,” Hayward says. “Bill was the same as he is now. He could be a little spacey,” Hayward adds with a chuckle. “He’s not always engaged with the conversation right in front of him because he’s looking ahead. Then, when he’s excited about something that interests him, he can talk fast, be hard to follow, jumping from idea to idea. He walks fast, too. He was that way when he was 25.”

At the time, blocks of rowhouses on Federal Hill’s north end stood vacant behind chain-link fencing, recalls Hayward, who went on to write several books about Charm City’s architecture and rowhomes. Acquired by the city when plans were still in the works to build a bridge across the Inner Harbor—to link to a planned urban expressway through Fells Point—the rowhouses had been abandoned after the defeat of the highway by local activists, including a certain feisty social worker named Barbara Mikulski.

Other houses on South Charles Street remained burned-out shells, and more homes on South Hanover Street were empty and boarded up. Stories in The Sun referred to the “slums” of South Baltimore. A body was reportedly discovered in one of the abandoned rowhomes they purchased.

Three years earlier, Struever’s mother had accepted a job at Hopkins teaching Renaissance history, and he’d decided to tag along to the city following graduation from Brown. He’d learned of then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s $1 housing program and saw potential opportunity in Baltimore even as others were fleeing for the suburbs. He dragged his brother Fred and college roommate, Cobber Eccles, with him to the city.

The trio bought a pickup and plastered a hammer logo on it, earning beer money their first year from basic home improvements. “I thought it might be something that lasted a year before I headed to graduate school,” says Eccles, who remains a Struever partner.

Their first home at 436 Grindall Street in Federal Hill—Struever has never forgotten the number—was purchased with a $10,000 loan from his mother. They eventually rehabbed three more in the group and created a grassy knoll between them, naming it Chandler’s Yard in tribute to the ship chandlers who had lived nearby. But Struever soon realized that if they were going to be successful flipping old houses, they needed to revitalize the neighborhood’s commercial life—jump-start the kind of businesses, restaurants, and shops that make urban neighborhoods convenient, attractive, and fun for pioneering young home buyers.

“Our banker told me someone needed to do something with the Cross Street Market and reopen the nearby storefronts,” Struever says. “Otherwise, nothing would sell. [But] I didn’t have any money. Then he told me he’d loan me the money to do it. We eventually bought 40 storefronts, and I’ve been borrowing money ever since.” Struever and his partners launched the Sundae Times ice cream parlor on the south side of Cross Street, a children’s bookstore, and a gourmet cheese stall in the market.

Their most successful venture proved to be a bar and live-music venue called Hammerjacks at the corner of Cross and South Charles streets. “We sold more cases of Budweiser than any bar east of the Mississippi,” Struever says with a bit of pride.

Ever restless and adventurous (Struever has been known to kayak across the harbor to meetings), he quickly turned his attention to more audacious projects, such as redeveloping Clipper Mill, the former sail factory on the Jones Falls. Inevitably, as with the Tindeco, Canton Cove, and American Can Company projects, he saw value where few dared to tread. He also displayed a knack for marrying private investments with public subsidies and tax credits, which continues to this day. In the process, he reshaped the city’s deindustrialized harbor and decaying riverfront mills into national models of adapted renewal.

Struever didn’t invent the exposed piping, beam, and brick aesthetic, nor the modern commercial, office, and residential district, as Baltimore architect and former Struever collaborator Klaus Philipsen points out. That had been done previously in places such as SoHo, San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square, and the docks of East London. But Struever convinced an often-timid Baltimore, Philipsen recalls, that it could be done here. “I arrived in Baltimore [from Germany] about when Bill did, and the city was in transition, and not in a good way,” Philipsen says. “He and his team were enterprising, the first to use adaptive reuse principles. He understood the power of design and value in preserving these assets. It’s much easier to go to the suburbs and build where nothing else exists.”

Struever’s mentors included the also famously rumpled, civic-minded developer James Rouse, who built Harborplace, Cross Keys, and, from whole cloth, Columbia. Ted Rouse, James’ son, became the fourth partner of Struever’s team early on. Not that Struever was in concert with James Rouse on everything. “We disagreed over Columbia,” he says. “Why create something out there when you already have the density and ingredients and creative energy of city life? I was never interested in the suburbs. It’s fake. Nothing’s authentic.”

Another mentor was Walter Sondheim, the former chairman of the school board who spearheaded the desegregation of Baltimore’s public schools following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Struever, too, sat on the Baltimore City Board of Education for a period, among numerous boards over the years. He also practiced what he preached, living in the city and sending his daughters to public schools.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t think anyone can deny the redevelopment of the Can Company and Canton waterfront and the rest were thoughtfully done,” says Abell Foundation president Robert Embry Jr., reflecting on Struever’s landmark accomplishments. “He’s a city treasure. I grew up in Northeast Baltimore, and I’d never seen the water there as a kid. It was industrial. There was no reason to go down there.”

“It is much easier to go to the suburbs and build where nothing else exists.”

There were hiccups along the way—a failed effort to develop the Port Liberty area and the early ’90s recession took their tolls—but eventually the success of Struever Bros., Eccles, and Rouse enticed the celebrated developer to look beyond the beltway to places such as Wilmington, Delaware; Durham, North Carolina; and Providence, Rhode Island—even Boston and Fenway Park. And then, leveraged to the hilt as the financial crisis hit in 2007, the whole company came tumbling down.

Projects such as the State Center, Harbor East, and the completion of Brewers Hill had to be handed off to other developers. The Olmstead, a planned 12-story building on St. Paul Street in Charles Village, stayed a fenced-in hole in the ground. Lawsuits for failure to pay contractors and vendors and loans piled up across multiple states. Struever never declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which would’ve been the easier and personally less costly route, instead spending the subsequent half-decade mitigating the damage and working out of the mess. The formation of Cross Street Partners enabled him to begin again with consulting projects, but the heavy losses essentially sidelined him until recently in terms of full-blown development work.

“A lot of sleepless nights,” Struever says. “We employed about 400 people, and there were hundreds of others affected, obviously. That’s what keeps you up, trying to figure a way out.”

The $30 million Hoen project, which recently received $1.6 million grant from the federal government and a visit from a Trump Administration commerce official, has already attracted major tenants, including Strong City Baltimore and the Association of Building Contractors, which will move their trades training programs here.

With exterior brickwork and window replacement underway, the building is scheduled to open in 2020. Whether the A. Hoen & Co. Lithograph complex—135 years after its construction—can again serve as a catalyst for wider East Baltimore revitalization and convince mixed-income, black homeowners to remain, return, or buy in the broader neighborhood remains a open question. It could take a generation. Or two. It took decades for a tipping point of new young families in Canton and Federal Hill to send their kids to local public schools.

Barbara Mikulski says part of Struever’s genius in Locust Point and Canton, in particular, was recognizing not just the potential to renovate ex-warehouses and make them look hip, but the 21st-century innovation economy jobs they could attract. The 83-year-old, the longest-serving woman in the history of the U.S. Congress, had worked a summer in one of those old Canton factories making ketchup.

A half-century later, as senator, she helped bring a NASA incubator office into the Can Company building. In his second act in East Baltimore, Struever’s taking a calculated gamble on the continued expansion of Hopkins’ medical-research network and local nonprofits, like Strong City and Humanim, as well as the new Food Hub incubator and the Association of Building Contractors skilled workforce programs, to generate jobs. It’s a new kind of undertaking. It’s not just the buildings that have been left behind here, but the people who live in this community. Unemployment rates in East Baltimore are double that of the city as a whole. In some neighborhoods, half of the residents didn’t graduate from high school. “There needs to be a holistic approach,” cautions Rev. Donte Hickman of nearby Southern Baptist Church.

“The area needs more mass transit, the whole city does, and we need to invest more in our schools. That’s crucial, too,” adds Mikulski, who has paid close attention to Struever’s projects over the years. No one person is going to fix the city, she stresses, including the next mayor.

“There are no saviors,” she says. “But one thing Bill likes is to take people to Portland, or New York, and see what we can learn from each other. Pittsburgh and Detroit suffered the same body blows, and look at the great things happening in those places. We don’t want to copy them, but we can gather ideas. Bill gets people talking to other people about the city, its spaces, and [he] imagines what Baltimore can do—and it’s never cookie-cutter stuff. That’s what he does best.”