Two-dozen curious environmentalists, taking a bike tour of something described as the Harris Creek Watershed, stop pedaling, and pull up in front of the Patterson Park branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Their tires come to a rest over several large, metal stormwater grates. They’ve already toured Real Food Farm on the grounds of Lake Clifton High School, where they were told the watershed’s headwaters begin. They’ve toured Duncan Street’s Miracle Farm, built on a vacant block in East Baltimore. They’ve ridden south past the Baltimore Recycling Center, Collington Square Park, the Reggie Lewis Memorial Basketball Courts, and bustling but trash-strewn Frank C. Bocek Park.

However, there’s been no sign—visible or otherwise—of Harris Creek. Not until a whiff of putrid air emanating from the aforementioned storm grates smacks Joy Goodie, atop her bike, square in the nostrils.

“Oh, it smells bad,” blurts Goodie, turning her head just before the stench hits everyone else, including her husband and two kids. “It’s repugnant.”

“That’s Harris Creek,” deadpans Leanna Wetmore, program coordinator with Banner Neighborhoods and a tour volunteer with organizer Ben Peterson. Wetmore notes the creek now runs entirely beneath the city, long ago co-opted into the massive underground storm-water system. “The water’s visible if you look down there,” Wetmore adds as a few brave souls take a peek. “When there’s a really big storm, the drains back up and flood this whole area. It can move cars parked here.”

Hard to imagine today, but Maryland Historical Society paintings from the late 1800s actually show boats sailing on the creek through Patterson Park to Canton and the harbor.

Peterson explains to the group—still slightly stunned by the odorous discovery of Harris Creek—that the city’s century-old sewage pipes (some made of wood) run parallel to equally antiquated stormwater pipes. When the outdated sewage lines inevitably bust, raw waste flows into the stormwater lines, entering the harbor untreated. And when thundershowers just as inevitably overwhelm the stormwater system, trash and chemical pollutants from streets, rooftops, and pavement get whisked downstream.

Of course, it’s not just buried Harris Creek that is regularly debased, but the Jones Falls, Gwynns Falls, Middle Branch and Patapsco River, among other harbor tributaries. At the tour’s end, where Harris Creek empties into the harbor, not far from Canton’s Waterfront Park, where residents once swam and crabbed and local clergy dunked their flock in full-immersion baptisms, frustrated activist Raymond Bahr calls healing the harbor, “mission impossible.”

And, yet, three years ago, the Waterfront Partnership—along with a mix of nonprofits, business leaders, city officials, and harbor advocates—set a public goal, in consultation with environmental scientists: Make the harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020.

“Just think, to not only stand at the edge of the harbor but to dangle your feet in the water and jump in,” Waterfront Partnership President Laurie Schwartz suggested when the Healthy Harbor initiative and “swimmable, fishable” goal was announced in 2009. “Downtown Chicago has a beach . . . why can’t we?” It’s a good question, but only last year the Maryland Department of the Environment shot down an effort by the Baltimore Rowing Club to host a triathlon.

At the same time, other cities have reclaimed their iconic waterways, at least to an extent. The Boston Harbor is now referred to as a “jewel” by the EPA decades after The Standells mocked the city’s harbor in their 1966 hit “Dirty Water” and the first George Bush blamed Michael Dukakis for dumping “500 million gallons of barely treated sewage” daily into the harbor during the 1988 presidential campaign. Striped bass and shellfish can be caught in Boston Harbor today, and recreational swimming has returned as well. New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., all hold annual swimming events in the tested waters of the Hudson, the Schuylkill, and the Potomac.

By coincidence, the morning following the Harris Creek tour, the Waterfront Partnership released the most comprehensive report ever on the harbor’s water quality. The grade: C-. Those who compiled the report, however, admit the harbor was scored on a large curve. The C- indicated that the harbor’s overall water quality was acceptable only 40 percent of the time; a score of 50 would’ve been considered a mid-range “C,” indicating that water quality met acceptable standards on half of the days.

“As it was, in our system, the grade was just percentage points above a D+,” says Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper Tina Meyers, who assisted in compiling the report card. “If you used high-school grades, it would be F’s all the way from zero to 60 percent.”

The study measured nitrogen, phosphorus levels, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, and water clarity—sunlight being necessary for healthy underwater plants and organisms—at 28 locations from the Inner Harbor and Fort McHenry to South Baltimore’s Middle Branch area. Or, all water west of the Harbor Tunnel.

The study did not quantify levels of trash, which doesn’t have comparable standards—except that you know it when you see it. “Litter wasn’t tested. If it was, it would receive a failing grade,” says Adam Lindquist, the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor coordinator.

Lindquist doesn’t dismiss the 2020 “swimmable, fishable” goal, but acknowledges the pace of efforts needs to be stepped up. “It’s an aggressive goal, but you need to set goals and then gather data to measure progress.”

District 1 Councilman James Kraft, the City Council’s strongest environmental advocate, isn’t quite ready to dismiss the 2020 target, either. He emphasizes, however, “We need to do something really bold. These grades are important, but we have a long, long way to go.”

At the June release of the Healthy Harbor report, Kraft highlighted two bills he’s sponsoring or co-sponsoring to help clean up the harbor. One is a ban on polystyrene—the ubiquitous carryout foam containers and cups that all too often end up floating in the city’s waterways. The other proposal is a 10-cent fee on plastic bags from retailers, convenience stores, and supermarkets. He hopes each passes, but the polystyrene vote was postponed shortly before Baltimore went to press.

Both Kraft and Councilman Brandon Scott note the positive impact a bag fee in D.C. has had on the Anacostia River. Scott believes the measure would change consumer behavior and tweeted that getting Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and her administration “to agree to use it [revenue from the bill] for green initiatives is key” to the legislation’s overall success.

“Sometimes in Baltimore, we’re guilty of living in a vacuum. There are things we see working in other cities, but we keep doing things the way we’ve done them forever,” Scott says. “For Baltimore to move into the 21st century, to become a sustainable city, we have to change that mindset.

“We have more plastic bags in the streams than fish,” Scott adds. “If you go to Herring Run Park, all you see is plastic bags.”

Beyond plastic bags and foam cups and containers, Kraft dreams of one day opening Harris Creek up again near Canton’s Lakewood Street. More significantly, he’d really like to see the Jones Falls opened up from the Penn Station area down to the Inner Harbor, where it’s buried under concrete. It’s a process known as “daylighting” and has been done with the Saw Mill River, for example, buried for some 90 years in downtown Yonkers. Partly, it’s an effort to improve aesthetics and return natural landscape to the city, but it would also eliminate pavement and, potentially, runoff. Kraft says it would help Baltimoreans become more conscious of their environment and its value.

“We need to daylight some of these streams we have in Baltimore and take up the concrete,” he says. “We need to study it and make it work. When Sheila [Dixon] was mayor, she talked about wanting to do it with the Jones Falls.”

In the immediate future, Kraft and others say improving stormwater management, starting with a greater cooperation from Department of Public Works, remains the single biggest factor in improving harbor water quality. Kraft says the DPW needs to hand out 5,000 trashcans in under-served areas and do a better job of sweeping streets. At the same time, he adds, as much impervious surface as possible needs to be replaced with parks, trees, and green roofs. Rain gardens and rain barrels can also be used to offset runoff. High-tech materials, such as pervious concrete, can replace traditional parking surfaces as well. The Maryland Science Center, for example, is planning on tearing up its lot in favor of a pervious surface.

It’s exactly the stormwater crises, affecting much of the Chesapeake Bay, that the so-called “rain tax,” passed by the General Assembly, is designed to address. Ten jurisdictions, including Baltimore City and Baltimore, Howard, Anne Arundel, Carroll, and Harford counties, had to establish a stormwater fee structure—generally based on square-footage—by July 1 to fund infrastructure improvements.

“Bacteria [from fecal matter] is actually not the main problem,” says Kraft, who drives a Prius and proudly points to the fact that his Canton waterfront district received the highest mark, a C+, in the Healthy Harbor report. “It’s polluted stormwater that’s making it unhabitable for life, that causes the dead zones and the fish kills.”

That said, sewage spills remain a tremendous problem for Baltimore, and, in fact, the city is under a 2002 EPA consent decree to address “continuing hazards posed by hundreds of illegal wastewater discharges of raw sewage. . . .” The agreement requires the city to complete an extensive sewer upgrade by 2016, a timeline city officials are negotiating to push back several years. Kraft says that the city, despite increasing sewage fees, lacks the funds to complete the overhaul, with an original cost projection of $1 billion, on time. But the work will eventually get done, he says.

“One of the good things is this is not just the ‘greenies’ tilting at windmills, it’s everyone, it’s a unified front,” Kraft says, referring to what he views, finally, as a citywide commitment for cleaning up the harbor. “That’s including leaders in the business community who want this to get done because they see a clean harbor as an economic engine for tourism, for attracting businesses, and for attracting employees.”

Meyers, the harbor’s waterkeeper, goes on the water every Wednesday at 7 a.m. on a 16-foot, Honda C-Dory, gathering samples at precise GPS locations, from beneath the Domino Sugars sign to newly added spots at Bear Creek in Dundalk and Curtis Bay. She’s employed by Blue Water Baltimore, which grew out of five local clean-water organizations in 2010. Also, starting this year, she’s leading teams that track water quality in the Jones Falls and Gwynns Falls.

Meyers studied environmental science and biology at the University of Rochester and has a law degree from SUNY University at Buffalo School of Law. Previously, she worked as an attorney at the University of Maryland School of Law’s Environmental Law Clinic. She says her affinity for the water developed growing up in Buffalo, near Lake Erie, where her father still has a boat. While she wears protective gloves when she dips her hands in the harbor, she remains optimistic about its future. She notes, for example, that even if most of the sewage upgrades, per EPA decree, aren’t finished until 2019, that still fits inside the 2020 timeline.

“I’d say the goal is ‘fishable, swimmable by 2020’ with an asterisk,” Meyers says. “Swimming may not be possible, but boating and working on the water can be made safer from a health standpoint. I’d like it to be safe for someone to drop a line in the water, to fish and crab. At the same time, they should probably release their catch because of the PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls] and mercury in the sediment—these aren’t just environmental issues, but public-health issues for everyone.

“Sewage, stormwater, trash, toxins—we have all these problems,” Meyers says. “The good news is they are absolutely solvable. I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought otherwise.”

If nothing else, Kraft says, perhaps only half-joking, “These boys I see who are [illegally] crabbing, it’ll be less likely they will be glowing in the dark after they eat their crabs.”

It’s Friday morning rush hour at The Park School of Baltimore, as sunlight—and students—stream into the lower-school lobby. With the school day about to begin, the mood is something akin to “rope drop” (or opening hour) at Disney World, as an eager crowd of students waits for the clock to strike 8:10 a.m., the time they are first allowed down the hallway into their classrooms. To bide time, two students play a game of one-handed catch; another student helps second-grade teacher Deborah Silverman fill bags for the monthly Viva House food donations; still other students inch down the hallway while Patti Steinberg, administrative assistant and ad hoc keeper of the gate, holds the crowd at bay. “I always have my crew of kids who ask, ‘How much longer?’” laughs Steinberg.

Third-grader Leo Meltzer has the morning shift down to a science. “We get excited about the day,” he explains, smiling. “We are supposed to walk down the halls, but sometimes we run. I usually fast walk to get to my class.”

From her room, third-grade teacher Ann Starer, has witnessed the early morning stampede for her past 13 years at the Brooklandville school nestled on 100 acres just off Old Court Road. “Some people try to hold them back,” says Starer, “but I see it as beautiful. They are literally racing and bursting into the rooms. They can’t wait to get there.”

Kids who love school so much they need to be contained from rushing to class? That’s one for the books, and somewhere, Hans Froelicher Sr.—who co-founded the school 100 years ago—is surely smiling.

From the outset, The Park School took a revolutionary approach to education, distinguishing itself from other area independent schools with an emphasis not only on reading, writing, and arithmetic, but on a style of joyful learning that’s still tangible in the school’s storied halls.
“Former headmaster Parvin Sharpless likes to tell a story about a father who came to talk to him, [concerned] about his son,” says upper-school principal Kevin Coll. “The student was having a great experience, so Parvin tried to get at what the problem was. The father said, ‘I just have to tell you, I’m suspicious. Every day my child is eager to go to school.’”

By contrast, a century ago, the traditional approach to education emphasized that “children needed to be made to learn,” writes Jean Thompson Sharpless, author of The Park School of Baltimore: The First Seventy-Five Years (and Sharpless’s wife). But The Park School took a page from a burgeoning Progressive Movement of education—where, in the words of school archivist Michelle Feller-Kopman, “Learning was not forced, but a happy process.”

When it first opened on September 30, 1912—then located in a private mansion across the street from Druid Hill Park (hence the name)—The Park School was one of just a few progressive schools in the country. It was built as a reaction to political corruption (then-Mayor James Preston favored the spoils system) and a lowering of educational standards in the Baltimore public schools, as well as the anti-Semitism prevalent at the time.

“Park was founded because of exclusionary practices in Baltimore,” explains Feller-Kopman. “Jews and Gentile parents were unhappy with the school system, and they started to look elsewhere, but the Jewish parents didn’t have [many] alternatives in Baltimore.”

The school was formed by raising $100,000 in 10 days from stock certificates and through a meeting held at the all-Jewish private club for men, The Phoenix Club. It was there that they ironed out the final details of the mission of Park School, “a co-educational institution . . . which will absolutely ignore religion, leaving that strictly to the home training,” according to a March 26, 1912 article in The Baltimore Sun.
“We were pushing social barriers,” says director of upper-school admissions Ruthie Sachs Kalvar, who graduated from Park in 1985. “For Jews and Gentiles to be educated together was a really progressive notion for Baltimore back then.”

Decades later, in June of 1954, Park made Baltimore history again: Under mounting pressure from the student body, the board voted to “receive application from any family suitable in interest or ambition,” making Park the first independent school in Baltimore to admit African-American students as well. (Though Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in public schools in May 1954, the law did not apply to private schools.)

Veteran Park history teacher and lacrosse coach Stephen “Lucky” Mallonee, who attended Park’s kindergarten in 1949 and graduated in 1962, reminisces about those tumultuous times. “I don’t recall the students having any problem here,” says Mallonee. “But I do remember a bunch of Park students eating at [The White Coffee Pot] with Wilhelma Garner, one of the first African-American students on campus. The story goes that the waitress came over and said, ‘We don’t serve black people,’ and she said, ‘I’m not black, I’m Hawaiian.’ At the end of the meal, the waitress came over and said, ‘You’re the first Hawaiian we’ve ever served.’ And Willie said, ‘There will be more.’”

Pick a random day of the week to visit, and it’s hard not to notice that, true to Park’s roots, the school is still breaking new ground. It’s visible in the surrounding woods, where the school became one of the first in the country to include a student-designed Outward Bound–style challenge course; in the parking lot, where students in an automotive physics class drive a moped they’ve refurbished; and the hallways, where students seem to spill out and do everything from study plant life in the Arctic for an upcoming school trip to play the guitar.
Indeed, it’s in the classes and hallways of Park that the school’s educational ideals truly flourish.

“It is not untrue that you will find kids lying in the hallways when you walk by,” says Pete Hilsee, director of communications. “But they’re not talking about SpongeBob. They’re talking politics, science, and math. They’re collaborating, they’re speaking in groups, and looking at primary sources.” Upper-school English teacher Howard Berkowitz puts it another way: “We’ve given these kids freedom . . . If you put limits on kids then they hit those limits and that’s it. They own their education here. It’s not imposed [on them].”

Dan Paradis became headmaster at Park in 2008, in part, he says, because “Park is known as an academic powerhouse.” He used to bristle at the widely-held notion that students “run the school.” After all, that’s his job. But now he’s proud students play such a strong role. “Student voices matter at Park.,” he says.

Senior Abi Colbert-Sangree concurs. “I feel like I can have an impact at Park,” she says. Case in point: When Colbert-Sangree attended a student diversity conference last January, she learned about gender diversity, which inspired her (and others) to create a gender-neutral bathroom. “A population of kids at Park do not feel safe, due to their gender identity,” says Colbert-Sangree. “We thought that a simple way to improve their school life would be to convert a bathroom at Park to an ‘anybody’s bathroom.’” Colbert-Sangree and her cohorts met with teachers, wrote petitions and letters, and attended school faculty meetings to help make their plan a reality. The result: a men’s bathroom was converted to a gender-neutral bathroom this summer.

Senior Hannah Block echoes Colbert-Sangree’s sentiments. “I switched from Owings Mills High School my junior year,” says Block, “because I wasn’t getting the education I wanted. I love how involved we get at Park, I love that our teachers ask us what homework seems appropriate at the end of a class, I love that we are asked what we think.”

Alix Spiegel (Class of ’89), an award-winning NPR science reporter and founding producer of This American Life, is one of many in a long list of accomplished Park graduates (among them: Tom Rothman, CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, theoretical physicist Edward Witten, who invented superstring theory, and Manfred Guttmacher, the first forensic psychiatrist in the country and key witness at the Jack Ruby trial).

Spiegel says she remains indebted to the school she attended for 13 years. “They value critical thinking and individuality and that’s what has carried with me,” she says. “The intellectual curiosity that Park encouraged has helped me in my current job. They cultivated the sense that we live in this really interesting world that is full of possibility, and that has stuck with me to this day.”

Still, despite its roster of famous graduates, not all students are so anxious to get out there and make their mark on the world: “At Park, I’m excited to go to class and for all the things we do,” says Block. “I’ve asked my mom if I can fail this year so I can stay for another year! I’m not sure they’d like that, but I know I would.”se

Baltimore can be a pretty creepy town.

Neighborhoods like Fells Point and Mt. Vernon have hundreds of years of colorful history ripe for ghosts and other apparitions. Edgar Allan Poe gathered inspiration for his morbid tales from these streets. And the remnants of the city’s once-bustling industrial core have been left to decay and descend into eeriness.

With Halloween just around the corner, we profile eight of the spookiest places in our spooky town. Explore them . . . if you dare.

Westminster Hall

The 19th-century Presbyterian church, located on the corner of West Fayette and Greene Streets, boasts the burial place of one of Baltimore’s most famous—and scary—residents: Edgar Allan Poe.

The poet’s headstone, situated near the back of the 200-year-old graveyard, has become the church’s claim to fame. A pillar, bearing a carving of Poe’s face, collects pennies, roses, bottles of cognac, and other gifts throughout the year. But while Poe may be the most famous resident, he is not alone. Just feet away from Poe’s resting place are the catacombs that lie beneath the church and were created more than 60 years after the cemetery’s founding.

When the church was built in 1852, grave robbers roamed the streets in search of cadavers they could sell to the nearby University of Maryland Medical School. To deter desecrators, the church was built above part of the graveyard, fortified by stone arches. And it is here that things turn truly spooky.

With little light and low ceilings, a dusty dirt path weaves through the headstones and tombs situated beneath Westminster Hall. Lu Ann Marshall, a Poe historian and tour guide who has worked at the site for more than 30 years, says she has had her fair share of horror-movie moments. Generations of psychics have picked up on the same spirit of a man in uniform yelling at them to “go away.” Visitors hear children playing peekaboo, and many spy a man in a gray vest roaming the catacombs.

Marshall is accustomed to the unexplained. While she claims to never have seen anything herself, she has felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up and her hands go numb in one particular room of the catacombs. Although Poe may finally be resting in peace, it seems others at Westminster Hall are not.

The Horse You Came In On Saloon

The Fells Point watering hole is the oldest bar in Baltimore and, as it boasts on the menu, the oldest continually operated saloon in America. Located on Thames Street, it claims to have been a drinking spot of Edgar Allan Poe, and is, perhaps, where he had his last drink before his death in October 1849.

Today, the old saloon has a Wild West feel to it with a dark wood interior filled with western memorabilia and red accent lighting. A common hangout for younger Baltimoreans, it often hosts live music. But the modern tunes that echo throughout the bar shouldn’t fool you. Regulars and those that work there claim to have seen a much older patron they call “Edgar.” Some claim cash registers open mysteriously on their own. Others that the door to a safe on the premises slams shut by itself. Occasionally, the bartenders leave out a glass of whiskey for Edgar after close, though he has yet to drink one. Whatever is going on in The Horse You Came In On, it is a bar rich with history—and perhaps something else.

Hell House

Just minutes from the quaint streets of historic Ellicott City lie the ruins of St. Mary’s College. Perched atop a hill deep in the forests that border Patapsco Valley State Park and Ilchester Road, the abandoned seminary bustled for more than a century with young men entering the priesthood. But since it closed in 1972 due to dropping enrollment, legend has engulfed what remains of the campus. The ruins continue to terrify local thrill seekers, who have given it the name “Hell House.”

Although many of the buildings have been torn down, the creepiness of the property persists. As you travel up the hillside, among overgrown pathways and crumbling staircases that lead to nowhere, the sounds of the road below fade out. The trees thicken and the sky above becomes obscured. Many of the original buildings lie in piles of rubble except for one: the remains of an old cemetery. Commonly mistaken for a chapel, the headstones are gone and the outer wall is crumbling. But centered atop a series of stairs is a decaying shrine. Its altar is tagged with graffiti, but a giant metal crucifix remains, jutting toward a columned covering.

It is here where many of the legends have emerged, including the nickname “Hell House.” One story claims a priest murdered several students and placed their bodies in the shape of a pentagram as a sacrifice to the devil before killing himself. Another maintains that a deranged caretaker roams the property toting a shotgun. Although such stories have long been disproved, the remains of Hell House are no less frightening, perhaps not for what is said to have occurred there, but for the deterioration and reclamation by Mother Nature herself.

Patapsco Female Institute

Not far from Hell House stand the ruins of another Ellicott City school: the Patapsco Female Institute. What was once an all-girls’ boarding school is now operated by Howard County as a park, used for everything from weddings to theater productions. The interior of the building has been gutted and cleaned up to allow for tours, but the hollow shell that remains still sends chills up one’s spine.

The school, which looks over Ellicott City, was operational from 1837 to 1891 and, under the direction of Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, grew to be a leader in female education, teaching not just those subjects common to finishing schools but academic courses as well. With the advent of public education, the school eventually closed, later becoming a hotel, veterans hospital, theater, and private residence before being abandoned for many years.

The Greek Revival structure, with its large white columns and granite walls, has been the setting for a variety of stories over the years. One repeated sighting is that of a girl named Annie Van Derlot, who is said to have hated her “incarceration” there but died of pneumonia shortly before her parents arrived to bring her home. Today, a barbed-wire fence and the county’s oversight have saved the school from the party location it was in the 1980s, and, on a bright autumn day, the ruins seem anything but frightening. But as the sun sets and darkness floods the grounds, the hollow rooms leave one wondering what’s around the next corner.

Jericho Covered Bridge

Nestled in the woods surrounding the Little Gunpowder Falls and connecting Baltimore and Harford Counties, the Jericho Covered Bridge sits in a sleepy bend of the narrow road that bears the same name. Originally constructed in 1865, the covered bridge is one of the last of its kind in the state. But to locals, it is well-known for other reasons.

The 88-foot-long bridge, with faded dark red paint, sneaks up out of the woods to travelers. As one drives across, the boards creek and crisscrossing rafters loom in the darkness above. The musty smell of old wood is unmistakable. But as nightfall engulfs the bridge and surrounding forest, travelers should beware. Some people driving across the bridge at night swear they see the shadows of lynched runaway slaves dangling from the rafters in their rearview mirrors. Others hear the screams of a little girl who burned to death in a wagon accident. And while many may experience no such thing, this aging bridge is a reminder of a time that is no more.

Rosewood Center

Abandoned or not, few places fascinate and terrify more than asylums. In Owings Mills, the decrepit buildings that once made up Rosewood Center speak not only to a disturbing era in American medicine but to the fragile nature of the human mind.

Originally established in 1888 as the Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded, Rosewood did not officially close until June of 2009. But through the years, a series of incidents, from reports of malpractice and abuse to deteriorating conditions and a case of suspected arson that burned the main building in 2006, led the state to first close the institution’s original buildings and later the entire facility.

After Rosewood’s original (and eeriest) buildings were closed in the late 1980s, those looking for a scare (primarily teenagers) began to venture into the vacated hospital. They found rooms with peeling paint filled with beds and wheelchairs as well as the remnants of the lives of thousands of patients. Ghost hunters, too, began to make the journey, reporting spooky noises and moving shadows. However, those wishing to experience the same thrill today are left to deal with blocked roads and a visible security force in response to years of vandalism. But seen from Rosewood Lane off of Reisterstown Road, the crumbling stone buildings on the hill are as ominous as ever.

Hampton Mansion

When the massive Georgian Hampton Mansion was completed in 1790, it was the largest private home in the United States. Owned by seven generations of the Ridgely family, Hampton Mansion’s lush gardens, ornate exterior, and Victorian interiors have attracted thousands of tourists since it was opened to the public in 1949 as a National Historic Site. Now operated by the National Park Service, they insist that no ghosts roam the home just outside of Towson. But many disagree.

One common story is that of a haunted chandelier that can be heard crashing in the house, signaling the imminent death of one of the home’s residents. When one goes to check, no chandelier has fallen. Another is of the ghost of Priscilla Ridgely roaming the mansion in a gown, which can be heard sweeping across the floor. And perhaps most disturbing is the story of a sick young girl named Cygnet Swann who died in the 1800s shortly after dreaming that a man with a scythe was chasing her through a wheat field, shouting that he was going to kill her one way or another.

Although the National Park Service has downplayed such stories in recent years, that has not stopped the sightings nor the legends that persist throughout the halls of Hampton Mansion.

Black Aggie

No ghost tour of Baltimore would be complete without Black Aggie. For generations, this monster of a statue terrified and petrified visitors.

The bronze figure of a seated woman in grief, draped in a shroud, sat in the Druid Ridge Cemetery on the Agnus family plot from 1925 to 1967. During her time there, Black Aggie became Baltimore’s most legendary terror. The common dare would be to sit in her lap late at night. Legend has it you could hear her heartbeat, and if you disrespected her, her arms would wrap around and crush you to death. Others said staring into her eyes would make one blind. She become a prime destination for fraternity hazing.

After years of such antics, the Agnus family and the cemetery finally had enough. Black Aggie was chipped away from her perch and donated to the Smithsonian Institution. For years, her whereabouts were unknown, leading some to believe the bronze monster was roaming freely. Today, however, the shrouded statue that terrified a city for more than 60 years sits in the courtyard of the Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C. Few seem to fear her in her new home. In fact, many pass her by without a clue of her reputation. But back in Baltimore, Druid Ridge Cemetery still receives visitors looking for Black Aggie. All that remains is the granite slab she gazed from, and the almost 100-year-old stain where she once sat.

In 1831, 22-year-old Enoch Pratt, a former Boston hardware store clerk, moved to Baltimore, launching a wholesale hardware business at 29 S. Charles Street. Proving a successful merchant, he expanded his business interests to iron and coal, as well as horseshoe and nail manufacturing. A decade and a half later, Pratt built a family home at Monument Street and Park Avenue, walking to work and to Sunday services at the First Unitarian Church, past the location where the 125-year-old Central Library that bears his name stands today.

“Mr. Pratt was a frugal man,” says Wesley Wilson, chief of the Central Library/State Library Resource Center. “He was known to pick up nails from the street as he walked, knowing well the effort that went into making them.”

Frugal, perhaps, but generous and progressive-minded, as well.

In 1882, Pratt presented an endowment of $1,058,333 to the mayor of Baltimore and the City Council for the purpose of building the city’s first—and one of the nation’s first—public libraries.

“My library,” said Pratt, “shall be for all, rich and poor, without distinction of race or color, who, when properly accredited, can take out books if they will handle them carefully and return them.”

The Central Library, then on Mulberry Street, opened January 5, 1886, and the first four branches—including the Canton branch, still in operation—followed within the next three months.

In 1927, by a 3 to 1 margin, Baltimore voters approved a loan for a larger Central Library at its current Cathedral Street location across from the Baltimore Basilica. Building began four years later, and was completed despite the Great Depression.

Overseen by director Joseph Wheeler, the new library’s construction incorporated Pratt’s egalitarian mission, creating a street-level, department store model ahead of its time. In 1943, the library’s outreach effort expanded with the introduction of a horse-drawn book-wagon service. In 1953, children’s films were added.

Today, the Central Library’s reach has expanded exponentially, serving as both Maryland’s state library and a major urban lending institution. It’s a research home for Baltimore writers and filmmakers, from Barry Levinson to David Simon, as well as a center for job seekers. There’s a WiFi cafe, chess tables, and a wealth of material for amateur genealogists. Programming includes everything from GED classes to discussions with best-selling authors.

Of course, nothing is changing faster than the delivery system—or “container,” as Pratt CEO Carla Hayden puts it—of the library’s core product: books. At the forefront of library and information services, the Pratt has long offered e-book downloads, and this fall, will become one of a handful of libraries lending e-book readers.

With all this in mind on the Pratt’s 125th anniversary, Baltimore magazine spent a week behind the scenes at one of the city’s most cherished institutions—visited by 1.7 million people annually—to find out just what it takes to keep such a sprawling and efficient system in place. Short answer? A lot.

The Vault

March 16, 11 a.m.
Hidden Treasures

Behind the locked glass doors where the staff works on the second floor of the Central Library, chief Wesley Wilson turns an enormous combination lock on a bank-style vault—like something from an 1870s-era Western. Pulling the door open, he reveals a trove of literary treasures, many from Baltimore’s famous writers.

There’s a Paris letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to H. L. Mencken, thanking the “Sage of Baltimore,” for reading the The Great Gatsby. Mencken’s diaries are here, as are several first-edition classics from his personal collection, including James Joyce’s Ulysses. There’s also the original copy of a library-contest-winning rap by Tupac Shakur, plus a CD of Shakur’s “The Eastside Crew,” performed while the aspiring rapper was studying at the nearby Baltimore School for the Arts.

A first edition copy of Virginia’s Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday, sits next to John Updike-signed novels. From the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, there’s a lock each of his and his wife’s hair, as well as a piece of his coffin.

One of the library’s more unique possessions stems from a discovery several years ago in the library itself. It’s a Megillah scroll, telling the story of Esther, completed in 1429 by a Persian scribe.

“It was located in our special collection’s uncatalogued stack, in a false book,” Wilson explains, pulling apart a small square that appears at first to be an actual book binding, but is actually the opening to a space where the scroll was stored. “It was left to us as part of a personal collection from a Baltimore Jewish family.”

The Wheel

March 18, 12:30 p.m.
An Answer to Every Question

Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and scattered six-inch thick tomes, four reference librarians sit at desks organized in a square configuration, facing each other. Plugged into computers and phones, the librarians answer questions from Baltimore, the state of Maryland, and, literally, the world—as they come in via telephone, e-mail, chat, and text message.

In the center of the desks, within arm’s reach of each librarian, spins what’s affectionately referred to as “The Wheel.” Completed in 1969, The Wheel, is a welded, seven-foot-tall, circular bookshelf, stacked with 800 reference titles, including The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Facts About the States, The Baseball Timeline, and Larousse Gastronomique, a leading culinary resource first published in 1938.

Queries come from students and academics, and most are part of rigorous research, but people also regularly call for crossword puzzle help, last night’s winning lottery numbers, or an Orioles score.

Other queries are even stranger.

“Someone once asked, ‘Where do people go when they’re dead?’ Another asked, ‘Am I my cat’s mother?'” recalls library professional assistant Maggie Murphy, explaining all questions are taken seriously and provided the most credible answer found. “With the person who asked if they were their cat’s mother, we quoted a biology textbook that stated a cat is the product of two cats, and therefore she couldn’t possibly be the cat’s mother.” Psychologically or socially, Murphy noted, there may be a different answer.

A fresh query arrives asking if Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets, included a movement for Pluto—de-planeted several years ago by the International Astronomical Union. Murphy shared with her client that Holst penned the suite between 1914 and 1916, before Pluto received planetary status.

Medical and legal queries are common: But Sonia Alcántara-Antoine, information services manager, cautions that those queries also point to the limited nature of the reference librarian’s role.

“As librarians we can’t give medical or legal advice,” she says. “We can cite medical or legal text, but we can’t interpret. We can’t go there.”

Graphic Jack’s Studio

March 18, 1:30 p.m.
A Window into the Art

“Everybody calls me ‘Graphic Jack,'” says Jack Young, extending a hand to a studio visitor. Behind him in his third-floor domain are life-size cutouts from Boris Karloff’s The Bride of Frankenstein. There’s also a Styrofoam black raven posing on a table, a nearly life-size installation of Rosa Park’s iconic Montgomery bus—complete with functioning headlights—plus mannequins, a gumball machine, an inflatable penguin (a gift from Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk), frames, easels, scissors, and pencils.

Among other things, Young designs and installs the eight-foot-tall mini-billboards that fill the Pratt’s giant windows on Cathedral Street, which preview upcoming events. For example, when Obama campaign manager David Plouffe came in September to discuss his book, The Audacity to Win, Young gave him Shepard Fairey’s iconic two-color Obama poster treatment.

To promote the library’s annual Black & White Party this year, Young combined Cary Grant’s stark image from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with a James Bond motif—in glamorous black, white, and red.

Whether it’s former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, professional wrestler Chris Jericho, or an author presenting a book about the Haitian crisis, Young starts with research, seeking to develop a compelling image linked to the subject. He sketches concepts, typically on the first random piece of paper he gets his hands on, before moving to the computer.

“The first thing to consider is that people may not know the author, so the question is, visually, how do I let a lot of people know instantly who this person is that’s coming to Baltimore?” Young says. “In terms of text, 14 words is generally the limit. Cathedral Street gets a lot of traffic and it’s got to be read by someone driving by.”

Young also works on graphics for Pratt brochures, in-house exhibits, and library partners, such as the CityLit Project. One memorable work included a super-enlarged—20-foot by 13-foot—bird’s eye view of Baltimore City from a 1869 map. The map was placed on the floor of the library’s main hall and visitors walked and knelt on it, exploring where their home, church, or office stands today.

But it’s the windows the MICA graduate views as his calling.

“We redid the front and side windows about a year ago, and modified the lighting system,” Young says. “I consider the Basilica across the street our competition for people’s attention. These windows really need to pop.”

Plouffe asked for four copies of his oversize poster. Pelosi requested that hers be sent to her after her appearance. Practically everyone does the same.

“I’ve got a lot of work, I’m always running behind, very behind—and I’ve almost fallen off the ladder [installing posters],” Graphic Jack says, “but I love my job.”

Wheeler Auditorium

March 20, 2 p.m.
Highlandtown Girl Returns

“Hi everybody! Hello! Hi! How are you?” Sen. Barbara Mikulski says, bounding into the Central Library’s Wheeler Auditorium. “Hi Charlie! Hi kids!” And, then to a woman, “Are you the lady who e-mailed me?”

Mikulski’s appearance coincides with Women’s History Month. The previous day, the Pratt hosted an International Women’s History Month Literary Festival, with female writers from Trinidad, Iran, India, and the U.S. The Senator is here to give a talk called, “Women of the Senate: Making History, Changing History.”

Mikulski recalls a phone call from a Library of Congress staffer who informed her last summer that, if she won reelection, she’d be the longest serving woman in the history of the Senate. The Library of Congress needed “artifacts” from Mikulski’s career, and naturally, she put them in touch with the Pratt.

“In 1886, Enoch Pratt established the branch at O’Donnell Street and Elwood Avenue—that was my branch as a little girl going to the Sacred Heart of Jesus School,” Mikulski says. “That library card was my ticket, my window to the world.”

“To me, walking down to the Enoch Pratt was a big deal,” the 74-year-old continues, recalling how books transported her to different worlds. “I went to Switzerland and had a girlfriend named Heidi. I had a horse named Black Beauty.

“And Nancy Drew mystery novels,” she adds with a laugh, “helped prepare me for my Homeland Security and FBI oversight committee assignments.”

Landing a U.S. Senator for Women’s History Month is no small feat, but for coordinator of public programs Judy Cooper, it’s par for the course. Since being recruited from the Prince George’s library system 13 years ago, she’s transformed the library into a must-stop venue for writers. The fun ones, too.

Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk made a memorable visit—tossing inflatable autographed penguins to a standing-room crowd. Ben Mezrich, The Social Network author, has been here, too.

On the heels of Barack Obama’s election, Bill Ayers’s visit created a barrage of nasty phone calls and e-mails, as well as a small protest at the library when he and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, came to discuss their book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy.

“We’ve invited Bill O’Reilly in the past, and we’re trying to get [Republican Senator] Scott Brown,” says Cooper, highlighting the library’s nonpartisan efforts.

Scheduled for April 26, the rapper Prodigy, who recently published a memoir, was expected to pack the place.

“The events are free and we don’t pay most of these authors,” Cooper says. “They want to come here.”

Bindery Department

March 18, 12:30 p.m.
The Secret of Wheat Flour Paste

Upstairs in a quiet room filled with medieval-looking devices, book conservator Martha Edgerton readies a memorabilia scrapbook kept by H. L. Mencken for repair. The spine is torn at the edge and the text block broken, requiring sewing.

Nearby, Baltimore’s 200th Anniversary, 1729-1929, a print and photo collection, rests loose from its broken binder. “It needs a new cover,” Edgerton says. “It’s beyond repair.”

The older books hold up better than newer books, she says. The natural-fiber paper used before the early and mid-1800s, she explains, is almost fabric-like and lasts longer than wood-pulp paper.

“It’s an inferior product that’s used today,” Edgerton says, lifting a compilation of newspapers from the 1830s still close to their original color. “The acid content breaks everything down quicker. These newspapers look better than a Baltimore Sun that’s several days old.”

Book and letterpresses, decades old—and a guillotine-esque machine for slicing boards into book covers—sit on benches as volunteers tend to the careful work of preserving the library’s assets.

There’s newer technology, too: an ultrasonic welder for polyester encapsulation, which protects paper between pieces of chemically inert, clear plastic sheathing—safer than lamination. But the Old World techniques—the antique “Property of the Enoch Pratt Free Library” stamping machine and the homemade wheat-flour recipe for paste—serve as reminders of a timeless art.

“We wouldn’t want to use synthetic glue—it’s permanent,” Edgerton says. “It can’t be undone if the book is damaged in the future. The wheat-flour recipe can be reversed with water if necessary.”

Shipping and Receiving

March 16, 9:30 a.m.
Moving Pages

Loaded by 8 a.m., Enoch Pratt vans are making their way across the state, toting book bins that will eventually arrive in Bethesda, Cumberland, the Eastern Shore, and even the city’s jail. Now, Wendy Allen, the Pratt’s resource delivery manager, and her team begin filling new computerized orders, placing materials in 80 separate bins marked CECL, CARO, AACO, and HARF, among others, for tomorrow’s deliveries.

In Frederick, someone’s requested The Three Little Witches Storybook, which was located in a Harford County branch and sent here to be forwarded to the Frederick branch. A Montgomery County request for mystery/cookbook Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Crime was located in Howard County and also will leave tomorrow. Roughly 66,000 items are shipped monthly through the Pratt—the hub of the state library system.

The logistics seem daunting—the shipping office is broken down into requests from the two-dozen Baltimore City branches, the bookmobile, and the statewide county runs—but there’s a system.

A Pratt truck loaded with books for the Queen Anne’s branch, for example, meets one from the Eastern Shore just over the Bay Bridge each morning, and they exchange payloads. Likewise, a Pratt truck covering Frederick County meets and swaps orders with one from Western Maryland, which then heads to Allegheny, Washington, and Garrett Counties.

On one shelf sits a volume of Michie’s Annotated Code of Maryland, headed to the Baltimore City Detention Center library on East Eager Street.

“It’s not true that [prisoners] only ask for legal books,” says Barbara Collins, a supervisor in the shipping office, on the job for 33 years. “They ask for everything, the same books as everybody else.”

Material Selections

March 18, 9 a.m.
Creating a Virtual Library

In an office down a long, narrow hallway on the second floor, Sarah Kuperman, who works in the collections management department, flips through an industry catalogue of book reviews. She’s looking for potential nonfiction additions for the Pratt system.

Kuperman chooses which, and how many, new $24.95 titles the library needs—and can afford—to stay current. For the past decade, she’s overseen the selection of business, science, and technology books, as well as tomes on philosophy and most of the world’s religions.

The two-inch-thick industry guides help. Kuperman also relies on The New York Times bestseller lists, among other sources. Like everyone, she wishes she had more time to read all the books she selects.

“I try to stay within the amount of money given by my boss,” says Kuperman, who is working with a budget of about $15,000 a year for a specific project. “It’s a whopping sum for a public library. The entire system has a budget of about $2 million a year for new materials.”

At her computer, Kuperman begins sifting through data from Overdrive, the library’s vendor for e-books and downloadable audios. This is where everything is changing, and the rules still evolving.

Audio downloads, available through the Pratt since 2006, have increased 12-fold. And now e-books are transforming publishing—and libraries. On her screen, Kuperman can see which e-books are being downloaded at each branch, and where e-books are on hold.

Technically, publishers could easily offer unlimited downloads of their titles. However, they limit the number of times each purchase of an e-book by the library can be downloaded by borrowers—simulating the number of times each hardcover can be borrowed, for example, in a given year.

At the moment, Kuperman needs to order more downloads of The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown. Currently, the Pratt consortium owns 18 downloadable copies, 14 of which are out, with 36 holds at various institutions.

Contrary to stereotype, older readers have been among the early adopters of this new technology—because of the adjustable font. The most popular e-books from the Pratt reflect an older clientele’s interests: a historical novel by Ken Follett, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, and The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler.

Kuperman wishes more people knew about the library’s e-books. She also says “digital” seems like a quaint word today.

“I want to use ‘virtual library,'” she says.

Main Hall

March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), 10 a.m. to noon
The Footnotes

In a city known for early morning lines outside its methadone clinics, there’s another line that forms every morning—on the sidewalk in front of the Pratt. Close to 50 people gather, waiting to get into the stacks, begin research, borrow a DVD, and use the public computers, including four terminals dedicated to job hunting.

There’s also coffee and free Wi-Fi in the cafe.

Some come early for chess matches with two-foot-tall knights and bishops on the library’s black-and-white-checked floorboard.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and Enoch Pratt CEO Carla Hayden takes in the scene in the main hall from upstairs. Three of her staff members, a guitarist, a violinist, and a mandolin player, occasionally known as the Footnotes, are performing Irish music for library visitors. Hayden descends the stairs to pass out cookies.

Hayden, who missed Barack and Michelle Obama’s wedding (they were her neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park) to accept the Pratt position in July of 1993, has kept the institution at the forefront of library science for nearly two decades. She won the National Librarian of the Year award in 1995, vocally opposed the Patriot Act’s intrusion into public libraries, and earlier this year, was named a member of both the National Museum and Library Services Board and the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities.

St. Patrick’s Day was as good a day as she can recall at the library.

“We’re sitting in the Edgar Allan Poe Room and I hear music coming from the Central Hall, and its three staff members playing Irish music,” Hayden says. “There’s 30 to 40 chairs down there filled with senior citizens, younger adults, and some African-American kids listening to somebody on our staff playing guitar. There’s a mother with three little girls down in front, and a Hispanic women, who has a child with her—and books.”

“The diversity of the people was amazing,” Hayden continues. “And I thought, ‘That’s what this is about. That’s what this library’s mission has always been about.'”

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.”

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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.