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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irascible. Opinionated. Unpolished. Obsessive. And most of all: impatient. William Donald Schaefer was all those things, and more. In a famous 1984 cover story, Esquire magazine referred to him as “Mayor Annoyed.” In the same heartbeat, it also proclaimed him America’s “Best Mayor.”

After the 1968 riot and ’70s recession, with Baltimore facing the double whammy of de-industrialization and suburban flight, Schaefer convinced those who stayed, like him, that they had to work harder, faster, and smarter. He put a chip on the city’s shoulder, convincing us that the whole world was out for Baltimore and that we needed to fight back together.

Today, the ever-growing Inner Harbor stands testament to his transformation of downtown, often by sheer force of will. (See also: the Convention Center, Light Rail, Metro Subway, Camden Yards, and the Ravens.) And after nearly 40 years, the featured image of William Donald Schaefer—in an old-fashioned striped bathing suit and wielding a giant rubber duck—at the opening of the National Aquarium remains an indelible reminder of the former mayor’s deep commitment to Baltimore.

To be sure, Schaefer had blind spots, notably in regard to public education and social services, but looking at City Hall’s current struggle to forward an agenda —i.e. selecting a police commissioner—many Baltimoreans of a certain age believe the city is missing his iconic ethos: Do It Now. “There was management and a strategy in place,” says planning aide Ron Kreitner. “There was also a sense of urgency. You had to be on your toes.”

Schaefer’s legendary attention to detail also remains memorable. “I remember pulling up to a redeveloped block of formerly vacant houses and spotting him, already there, pulling weeds from a tree pit,” recalls former planning aide Ron Kreitner. “He was the mayor and not above pulling weeds. That was the message and it wasn’t staged. He made us paint our own offices and he painted his, too.”

Those anecdotes about Schaefer driving around on weekends and looking for abandoned cars, broken streetlights, and trash-strewn lots, then blasting agency heads in Monday meetings? All true. “I never saw him angry at an average citizen, but he could get angry with a city employee or staffer—and a Sun reporter,” says Abell Foundation president Robert Embry, who also worked for Schaefer. “He understood he couldn’t do everything himself, so he needed to push others to do more. He was married to his job, and he loved the city—that’s why people admired him.”

With his bootstraps mentality, middle-class tastes, and Hochschild Kohn department store suits, he personified the Baltimore everyman—and left, thus far, an irreplaceable legacy, for the people, politicians, and his former staffers, which included many women. “One of my favorite people in the whole world ever,” says Sandy Hillman, Schaefer’s former head of tourism. “Best years of my life working for him. I saw him two months before he died and told him that. ‘Mayor’—he was always Mayor to me, even after he became Governor—‘I never one bad day in the office.’ He said, ‘Oh, you’re delusional.’”

Siobhan Hagan digs Elvis and Polaroid photos. She has a metal Scooby-Doo lunch box. She wears 1950s dresses and vintage sweaters, and when the 33-year-old’s grandmother passed away, “I moved everything from her house into mine,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. The confessed “old stuff nerd” was born in the city and earned a graduate degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis there was built around the archives of WJZ-TV, which proved a fortuitous decision. The station hit the airwaves in 1948, and 70 years is a long time, enough for film to deteriorate and oxide particles to fall off magnetic television tape.

Hagan had grown up watching WJZ—“My mom turned on Rise and Shine every morning, it was my alarm clock as a kid”—and founded the nonprofit Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) two years ago. In the process, she acquired WJZ’s archives, then being stored, but without a plan to preserve the collection, at the University of Baltimore. Hagan is in the process of digitizing as much of the 25,000-piece acquisition as she can before the early footage and videotapes disintegrate.

On a recent night in Hampden, Hagan screened some WJZ throwback tapes as part of a fundraising effort. Highlights included Eyewitness News coverage of Hurricane Agnes in 1972, Richard Sher and Oprah Winfrey hosting People Are Talking, Chuck Thompson recapping the O’s stunning World Series sweep in 1966, irrepressible weatherman Marty Bass ditching his hairpiece, behind-the-scenes clips of The Buddy Deane Show—the inspiration for John Waters’ Hairspray—and Romper Room with Nancy Rogers Claster. Plus, Jerry Turner burying his head into the anchor desk in uncontrollable laughter after a rabbi’s son made funny faces, unbeknownst to his father, to the camera throughout an entire Hanukkah segment.

Beside the time-capsule clips of life in Charm City, which also include WJZ’s disco-era Evening Magazine, is footage from the ’68 riots, investigative pieces on racial issues and public housing, and, of course, coverage of the colorful 44th mayor of Baltimore, one William Donald Schaefer.

“People’s memories are sensitive to time, and these [tapes and films] are, too. They don’t last forever. They’re endangered,” says Rob Schoeberlein, who oversees the cavernous Baltimore City Archives in Better Waverly, which houses MARMIA’s office and the WJZ collection. “Normally, when we think of archiving material, it’s manuscripts, letters, legal documents, and photographs. This is now important material, too.”

Beyond MARMIA’s WJZ-TV collection, the nonprofit gathers other local films, found VHS tapes, recorded sound and mixtapes, and home movies in an effort to document the arts, history, and culture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Hagan will even digitize old wedding films—as long as MARMIA gets to keep a copy.

One couple, in their 80s, Hagan recalls, had never seen their wedding film—shot by the bride’s father and essentially lost for six decades—until their daughter rediscovered it and asked Hagan to digitize it. They all watched it for the first time last fall on a pop-up screen at the City Archives building.

“My parents had been bickering during the ride down. Over what, who knows? Just the way old couples do,” Susan Hebble says. “They were married in 1956, and the reception had been at the Casablanca, a jazz club in Liberty Heights that later became the Sportsman’s Lounge when former Colt Lenny Moore bought it. Zim Zemarel’s swing band played—you could see the name on the drum kit.”

Hebble says her family watched the film again over Christmas, and then again during her mother’s funeral this spring. “My mother had begun having some memory issues by the time we went [to the City Archives], but she had none while looking at their wedding. Everything came back, and she became her normal, bubbly self again. The whole way home, my parents were very romantic toward each other. My dad told my mother he had forgotten how beautiful she was.”

Baltimoreans appreciate our beloved hometown for its great neighborhoods, eccentricity, and “Smaltimore” feel, but political disarray, inequality, and violence have also long-plagued the city.

Matthew Crenson, professor emeritus of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Neighborhood Politics and the co-author of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. In his new book, Baltimore: A Political History, he tackles the tangled history of the city’s political and cultural disjointedness, examining the role of race and politics from the 18th-century through to our present circumstances  

Why this book and why now?
Like many Baltimoreans, I was curious about the city’s many curiosities. And it has been a long time since anyone told the city’s story. The second edition of urban geographer Sherry Olson’s book, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, appeared 20 years ago, and it concentrates on the physical development of Baltimore, not its political history.  

One vital research source also became more accessible when the Baltimore City Archives relocated and reorganized in 2010. The Archives are essential for understanding the city’s political past, but only a few authors have relied on these records.   

Of course, I could not have foreseen the death of Freddie Gray or the turmoil that would follow it [when I started working on the book]. Retracing the path by which we got here now seems even more vital than when I began. 

You make the case that Annapolis, the state capital, long held political sway over Baltimore. Do you think that’s still the case?
Because Baltimore was a late-blooming city, there was already an entrenched political establishment in Annapolis at the time of the town’s birth. It cast its shadow over Baltimore from the time it received its town charter in 1729. Even after it became a supposedly self-governing municipality in 1797, the city’s powers were limited by the state. The city, for example, could levy property taxes, but for decades after it became a city, the state legislature decided what the tax rate would be. 

Baltimore can fix its own property tax rate today, but the city’s police department is still technically a state agency, as it has been since just before the Civil War. The Governor’s cancellation of the Red Line reminded Baltimoreans of just how much control the state has over the city’s public transportation system. Then there’s the Maryland Stadium Authority. In 1997, Baltimore’s mayor conceded partial control of the city’s school system to the state in return for increased state funding. Governor Larry Hogan closed the city’s detention center (probably a good decision), but without consulting any city officials in advance. Baltimoreans are reminded of their exposure to state government every time the General Assembly convenes. 

Baltimore was home to the largest number of free African-Americans in the South in the decades before the Civil War—some 92 percent of black Baltimoreans were free at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. But you conclude white Baltimoreans were always afraid to address the issue of race head on. What drove you to that conclusion? Do you believe that’s still true?
As early as 1817, when prominent Baltimoreans became advocates of the American Colonization Society, the city’s leading whites have repeatedly practiced evasion or equivocation when confronted with issues of race or slavery. The Colonization Society proposed sending African Americans to Liberia. On the one hand, they argued that exporting free black people to Africa would help to preserve slavery in this country, because the presence of free black people made slaves restless.  On the other, they claimed that slave owners would be more likely to manumit their slaves if they could send them to Africa, instead of having to live with them after they were free.  Baltimoreans, in other words, managed to come down on both sides of the slavery question. Colonization would preserve slavery while eroding slavery. 

A long series of similar dodges led me to conclude that the city’s white leadership was leery about confronting the issue of race head-on,  perhaps because Baltimore is a border city where whites are unlikely to be united on issues of race. And then, soon after World War II, many whites abandoned the city for the suburbs. The exodus accelerated after the 1968 riots. Much of Baltimore’s former white population can now avoid the race issue—and practice segregation—without thinking or feeling like racists. 

Can you tell us when the division between Baltimore City and Baltimore County was created and why?
This is complicated. 

The separation was a two-step process—maybe three. In 1850, the General Assembly passed legislation that would enable the residents of Baltimore County to vote on whether to separate from Baltimore City. (The legislators held that this would be advantageous to Baltimore County.) The voters were also to elect a commission whose members would decide where to put “public buildings”—a courthouse, a jail, and a poorhouse—facilities which the County had previously shared with the City. The voters decided to disengage County from City. The Commission was elected, but couldn’t agree on where to put the public buildings. The commission divided down the middle on whether to leave the City.

In the meantime, the voters of the state approved the calling of a constitutional convention. When the convention completed its work in 1851, it placed Baltimore City and Baltimore County in separate judicial districts, requiring them to have separate courts and jails. In 1852, the General Assembly repealed its act of 1850 calling for the election of a commission, thereby depriving the commission of its authority to make decisions for the County.

If we can go back, say, before William Donald Schaefer, what important character, politician or leader should Baltimoreans know about—but probably don’t?
Mayor James H. Preston [in office from 1911-1919] was a creature of the Democratic political machine. But he had vision. He proposed a gradualist alternative to annexation. It would have created four “boroughs” outside Baltimore City, one in each quarter of the compass. The boroughs would be governed by their own councils and could purchase services from the City. As they bought in to more city services, they would eventually become parts of the City, which would achieve annexation, but without suddenly imposing high city taxes on former suburbanites. Unfortunately, politicians from Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties prevented Preston’s plan from becoming law. If they had agreed to it, we might have a viable metropolitan area government today—like Miami-Dade and Indianapolis.

Who is your favorite historical Baltimore political figure? And why?
This is hard. There’s John Pendleton Kennedy—novelist, politician, and designer of an iron bridge over the Jones Falls that would stand up to floods. Then there’s Samuel Smith—businessman, politician, and military tactician who anticipated every move that the British would make in their 1814 assault on Baltimore. And of course, there’s Frederick Douglass, who learned to read in Baltimore, and became the country’s premier writer and orator in the struggle against slavery. 

But I have a special admiration for Samuel Purviance, a forgotten Baltimore revolutionary. He chaired the city’s Committee of Observation during the Revolutionary War. It functioned as the town’s government, struggling to maintain public order in the face of the city’s anti-British hotheads, one of whom was Samuel’s brother, Robert. He also had to contend with a revolutionary government in Annapolis that was far from revolutionary. As late as January, 1776, the provincial convention declared its “affection for, and loyalty to the house of Hanover” [the British dynasty the produced six monarchs, including George III] and its conviction that to be British subjects “is to be the freest members of any civil society in the known world.” Purviance endured censure by the Annapolis authorities for trying to take the royal governor into custody. (The royal governor had been providing intelligence to the British military about prospects for invading the Chesapeake.) Purviance’s business interests collapsed in the recession that followed the Revolution. He tried to retrieve his fortunes in the West, but was captured by Indians while traveling by boat on the Ohio River, and was never heard from again.  

William Donald Schaefer stood at the edge of the National Aquarium’s 70,000-gallon seal pool and looked out at the reporters and spectators surrounding the tank. It was July 1981, and the Aquarium was a month behind schedule. The project was a $21.5-million risk, but it was a risk Schaefer knew he needed to take to help revive his city, struggling beneath the weight of empty row houses, unemployment, and high crime. As part of his Inner Harbor project, he believed the Aquarium would help restore Baltimore’s image and faltering economy, and he was willing to swim with the seals to prove it.

Wearing a striped Victorian-era swimsuit and straw hat, Schaefer took a 15-minute splash with a gray seal named Ike and a young model dressed as a mermaid. Onlookers laughed and cheered and, less than a month later, the Aquarium opened its doors on August 8, 1981, beginning the next phase of Baltimore’s urban revitalization.

As the National Aquarium celebrates its 35th anniversary this week, it’s standing on the edge again. As the interests and opinions of its visitors continue to shift away from aging point-and-look exhibits and traditional captivity methods, the Aquarium must follow the example of its original champion and commit to evolving as the city does.

When the 81-year-old National Aquarium closed in Washington D.C. in 2013, the Baltimore location snapped into action. It consolidated its animal collections and employees, redefined the future of the Aquarium, and mapped out the necessary steps to ensure it remained relevant to a changing audience.

“As the reality of the health of the world’s oceans came into sharper focus in recent decades, the Aquarium recognized and embraced the role it could play in motivating people to act on behalf of our planet’s well-being,” says Dale Schmidt, the Aquariums’ executive vice president and COO. “We have focused our efforts on conservation, which has led to the development of a comprehensive plan, and, so far, the reaction by our visitors and partners have been very supportive.”

With the help of a design firm and intelligence company, the Aquarium devised a plan to help it evolve from a tourist attraction with preservation projects into a full-fledged conservation program. Three major projects have been given first priority: creating a waterfront campus, building an off-site animal care and rescue center, and constructing North America’s first seaside dolphin sanctuary.

No one is more eager for change than the eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins swimming circles in the Marine Mammal Pavilion. For more than 20 years, they had jumped, spun, and whistled for audiences up to seven times a day, before the death of two baby dolphins in 2011 and visitors’ increased discomfort with animal captivity spurred the cancellation of the dolphin shows.

Overnight, the 1,300-seat pavilion transformed from a theater into an educational exhibit, where guests can visit and interact with the dolphins. In June of this year, the Aquarium announced that it plans to build an outdoor, seawater facility for the dolphins by the end of 2020. But until a site location is chosen, purchased, constructed, and the animals are relocated and retrained to live in an ocean-like environment, they will continue to wait in their 1.2 million gallon tank overlooking the Inner Harbor.

Walking through the Aquarium, evidence of the evolution is apparent in every corner. In 2012, the Wings in the Water exhibit, which was housed in the center of the original building for 32 years, was given a $12.5-million renovation and transformed into a replica of an Indo-Pacific coral reef, full of sting rays, sharks, and other larger fish. More recently, the third floor was gutted to create the Living Seashore exhibit, where visitors can experience the sights and sounds of the Mid-Atlantic shoreline.

Kate Rowe, director of media relations for the National Aquarium, says the Aquarium strives to give visitors an experience they can take home.

“You can read things, like some of our exhibits have placards with the animal’s Latin name, and a bit of information, but not everyone understands or takes anything away from that,” Rowe says. “Seeing, smelling, and touch makes it a whole other level of learning.”

Over the past five years, the Aquarium recognized a shift away from ogling at animals behind Plexiglas to engaging in the animals’ daily routines. To accommodate, they added activities like feedings and cleanings to the exhibits, which offer guests opportunities to observe every aspect of the animals’ day-to-day life.

In July, the Aquarium held more than 40 scheduled animal-to-visitor connections each day, which didn’t include daily feedings or other spontaneous interactions. According to Rowe, bringing the behind-the-scenes work to the floor has allowed Aquarium staff members to share their work directly with guests.

“The original thought was that it needed to be beautiful for when people visit,” she says. “But now, it’s so much more of an experience to see how we do it, when we do it, why we do it.”

“I like representing Baltimore in a way,” says Susan Magri, charter volunteer and exhibit guide for the last 35 years. “If I can give a visitor a good experience, hopefully they will tell other people that they had a positive time here in Baltimore.”

The Aquarium drew 1.34 million people in 2012, marking the first increase in visitor attendance since 2006. Six months after the opening of the award-winning Blacktip Reef exhibit, the Aquarium reported a 2.4 percent increase due to the amount of people lined up to see honeycomb stingrays and a rescued three-finned sea turtle named Calypso. In June of this year, The Aquarium announced that it’s on track to increase 7 percent above projections of about 1.3 million visitors.

The Aquarium still has work to do, as the interior layout begs for a change, and the additions of the Marine Mammal Pavilion and Australia: Wild Extremes exhibit have created enough of a traffic flow problem that a committee of volunteers is strategically stationed to help visitors navigate through the building. Jeanne Gang, the architect leading the redesign of the National Aquarium, has recommended relocating the entrance and realigning the escalators to help visitors move through the facility more easily, but restructuring the interior of the Aquarium is not on the immediate to-do list.

Even with a list of changes to be made, one glimpse at the mockup plans for the Inner Harbor 2.0 or the Blacktip Reef exhibit shows how far the Aquarium has come and where it wants to go. It also continues to modernize outside of its walls, through a growing social media presence with daily Instagram posts, Facebook comment contests, and regular video uploads to YouTube.

“The evolution of our offerings and the evolution of our guests have given us the opportunity to see that people want to learn,” Rowe says, “and they want so much more than to just see a tank of beautiful fish.”

Wally Orlinsky was so brilliant and so colorful, bursting with such passion and imaginative proposals, that you couldn’t help but want to be around the City Council president of the ’70s. “You leave him vibrating,” Ed Rovner, the state’s first secretary of economic and community development, told The Washington Post when Orlinsky made a bid for governor in 1978. “He can generate more ideas than anybody I’ve ever met.”

Rovner said there was no one he’d rather sit next to on a transcontinental flight. The only problem, he noted, was that only about one in 10 of Orlinsky’s ideas were feasible.

His plan to celebrate America’s bicentennial on July 4, 1976, by sending a 35-ton birthday cake into the Baltimore harbor on a barge was not feasible, for example. Not that it stopped Orlinsky. By the time a summer thunderstorm—who could’ve guessed?—washed 3,000 pounds of icing into the harbor before the big occasion, the doomed cake had already picked up the nickname “Wally’s Folly” around town.

Orlinsky’s pitch to the City Council had included selling 153,000 pieces of the cake to confectionary-loving patriots. That was supposed to pay for Baltimore’s massive 200th birthday party, which included fireworks, entertainment, and, for some unfathomable reason, 12 hours of live television coverage from Fort McHenry hosted by Ed McMahon.

But the July Fourth bicentennial enthusiasm never fully materialized. Crowds at Fort McHenry failed to meet expectations—as did turnout for events across the country, which was reeling in every way possible in the 1970s. The Sun reported that 30,000 people—half the projected numbers at best—made their way to the Independence Day anniversary. Maybe it was that the headliners included José Feliciano, Lynn Anderson, Rod McKuen, and Zim Zemarel’s Big Band. Not exactly big “gets.” (The Sun’s next-day story highlighted the smell of marijuana in the air during the all-night Saturday party at Fort McHenry, perhaps a sign of the times or merely an effort at stemming the boredom.)

“Sure, I remember the cake,” DeFilippo says. “Everything went wrong in the ’70s.”

Orlinsky’s cake, a Guinness Book of World Records effort created in the shape of the United States and decorated with 200 candles, fared worse. By midweek, the July weather and Baltimore’s renowned rats nearly finished it off. Seventeen tons got tossed.

As a metaphor for the government ineptitude of the 1970s—Watergate, Vietnam, the oil crisis, Love Canal, school busing, deindustrialization, double-digit inflation, crime, radical politics—Wally’s Folly wrote itself.

“Sure, I remember the cake,” says Frank DeFilippo, press secretary for then Gov. Marvin Mandel. “Everything went wrong in the ’70s.”

True to the period—a dark time in Maryland as well as national politics—DeFilippo’s boss faced federal corruption charges during the great bicentennial year and was eventually found guilty of mail fraud and racketeering.

Naturally, Orlinsky, too, would later do time for accepting a bribe.

There was one huge bright spot on the horizon, however, on July 4, 1976. Eight tall ships from around the world set sail from New York City that day for Baltimore. They’d arrive seven days later and dock at the Inner Harbor and Fells Point for the next week and change the course of the city forever.

In a broad sense, the country had continued to fracture in the decade following the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, when the murders of hopeful young leaders landed like a rock against the nation’s windshield. The United States would experience more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just 18 months in 1971 and 1972, including one at the U.S. Capitol. Much of the bombing was tied to the militant Weather Underground, and some to other groups like the Black Panthers, who were active in Baltimore, where one leader was convicted of killing a city police officer. By the mid-1970s, at least 150 planes had been hijacked in the U.S., many to Cuba.

By the bicentennial, the country was coming apart not just politically and culturally—the controversy-tackling All in the Family was the No. 1 television show from 1971-1976—but economically as well. Cities were going bankrupt. (The infamous New York Daily News headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” was published in October 1975 as the Big Apple sought a bailout.) Keep in mind this was also a period when it appeared as if the U.S. might just be losing the Cold War.

In Baltimore, unemployment during the 1970s jumped from 4.6 percent to 10.3 percent and the federal law enforcement agencies began to rate the city the most violent in the country. City residents may recall the deluge of local crises—the plant closings, the corruption, the population and commercial exodus (including our NBA team), and the rise of the drug trade. Also, spiraling homicide totals were unrivaled until this past year.

It’s not as if you could change the date of the country’s founding, however. President Lyndon Johnson had established a national bicentennial commission in 1966 and it was coming, hell or high water.

“It was on the calendar and it was going to fall when it fell—it just didn’t feel quite right when it finally arrived,” says journalist and political historian Jules Witcover, who witnessed the first of two assassination attempts on President Ford in September 1975 and wrote a book about former Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign the vice presidency in 1973 over bribery charges. “It was just a strange year to be celebrating with the country in so much turmoil. That’s the irony of it—the mood wasn’t celebratory. A few years later, Jimmy Carter gives his ‘malaise’ speech and talks about the crisis of confidence in the country.”

It’s amazing how much we forget about that time. Only two days before an Orlinsky interview promoting the 12-hour televised bicentennialathon at Fort McHenry appeared in the Sunday Sun, a sniper in a West Baltimore row house had shot seven police officers, killing one. Three days before that, there’d been an assassination attempt of then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer inside temporary City Hall headquarters on Calvert Street. Schaefer’s secretary told the deranged killer that the mayor, who was eating lunch behind a locked door, wasn’t in, but Councilman Dominic Leone was shot and killed. Another councilman, witnessing the attack, suffered a heart attack, and a third city councilman and a Schaefer aide were wounded.

All this came on the heels of the murder of Del. James “Turk” Scott Jr. in 1973 in a Bolton Hill parking garage. There were also the tumultuous 1974 municipal strikes that included thousands of city employees—from teachers to sanitation workers to police officers. It’s the ’70s as depicted in films like Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Network, and Rocky—even in a feel-good movie, the protagonist’s key epiphany is that he can’t possibly win. He can only try to go the distance.

“There’s a fatalism that takes hold in the culture that’s remarkable,” says Jefferson Crowie, a Vanderbilt University social historian and author of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. “Even in pop music, it’s there in corny songs like ‘Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.’”

Despite the compelling evidence to the contrary, however, many Baltimoreans were starting to feel hopeful about the future. That mayor who narrowly avoided assassination? He was corny, too. And funny and angry and mad. But not fatalistic. Never. He believed he could get things done that would make a difference in people’s lives, and he convinced the city it was on the verge of a rebirth.

“He was the original ‘do-it-now’ mayor,” says Barry Rascover, a former longtime political reporter and editor at The Sun. “Schaeffer was a mayor, like a Richard Daly in Chicago, who wanted to build things and put his name on it. There was an exuberance in the way he promoted Baltimore to Baltimore, as well as nationally, where it was seen at the forefront of a comeback city movement.”

In fact, while Orlinsky was attempting to pull off his over-the-top spectacle, Schaefer had organized his own team to lead a different project related to the bicentennial. Competing against cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, a city delegation traveled to Bermuda on behalf of Baltimore to pitch foreign captains and diplomats. In Operation Sail, as the project became known, Schaefer and his team sensed an opportunity for more than a one-off, made-for-TV event. It was the chance to bring to the city something larger, something emblematic of its actual contribution to American independence—Baltimore’s clipper shipbuilding past—as well as a glorious homage to the sailing culture of the state.

“The main thing about the tall ships, I think, was that it felt organic to the city,” Hillman says.

“The main thing about the tall ships, I think, was that it felt organic to the city,” says Bob Hillman, who Schaefer appointed chairman of the city’s Operation Sail committee. “The tall ships sailing out on the Hudson River on the bicentennial was a nationally televised event and people found out they were coming to Baltimore. The harbor and Fells Point were just packed. There were tens of thousands of people coming every day for a week. A couple hundred thousand on the weekend.”

Programs sold out the first day.

“People arrived from all over—Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania,” he says. “We hadn’t had that at the harbor ever before. We had no idea that people would come from so far away. I’ve heard that Jim Rouse, who had built Columbia, and just done a project in Boston, told the story that he was one of the people in those crowds. He became interested in developing a project at the Inner Harbor, as did city officials.”

That, of course, became Harborplace.

The Maryland Science Center had been erected, but little else existed other than a promenade and an empty lot at Rash Field, which had hosted the well-attended City Fair since 1973. That annual event brought Baltimoreans to the Inner Harbor once a year, but it didn’t attract tourists. By 1980, however, Harborplace, the Convention Center, and the Hyatt hotel had been built, and the National Aquarium would open a year later. Schaefer’s comic photo-op in the aquarium’s seal pool with a mermaid followed the bicentennial by five years, and Baltimore was suddenly a model for waterfront development.

Today, Baltimore’s tourism industry employs more than 16,000 residents, and in 2014, the city attracted 24.5 million visitors.

The enormous reinvention of the Inner Harbor, while by no means a panacea, also sparked a revitalization in nearby neighborhoods, including Fells Point, Canton, Federal Hill, and Locust Point. It also laid the groundwork for the construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium. More recently, mixed-use neighborhoods such as Harbor East and Brewers Hill have sprouted, with locally owned restaurants, national and regional employers, hotels, and luxury condominiums rising on the skyline. The largest arrival, Under Armour, after taking over a Proctor & Gamble factory, now intends to build a brand new minicity out of whole cloth at Port Covington.

Essentially, the case can be made that tall ships did more than save Baltimore’s bicentennial celebration—which was suffering from red, white, and blue fatigue long before Wally’s Folly. They helped create the Inner Harbor and shifted the narrative around Baltimore as a dying industrial city. That was Schaefer’s vision.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, either, that Orlinsky—despite the cake, despite the 1982 conviction after taking a hauling company bribe—was in many ways a positive force for Baltimore. He forged some of the city’s early biracial coalitions and opposed the urban highway—supported by Schaefer—that decimated West Baltimore and would’ve decimated the harbor neighborhoods, too, if it had not been stopped.

A few years after Orlinsky served four and a half months in jail, Schaefer put his old nemesis in charge of a state tree-planting program. With newfound humility, he garnered the nickname “Wally Appleseed.” A few years after that, unable to land another political job, he was selling lemonade at Camden Yards.

On July 4, 1976, Roger Simon, a nationally syndicated columnist, penned a column that appeared in The Sun and has been reprinted every year since in one publication or another.

The title was “America’s glorious failures,” and in the award-winning piece, Simon chronicled his refusal to stand up for the playing of the national anthem during the height of the Vietnam War in 1969. He wrote that he’d learned a lot about America since then, mostly from everyday people he’d met like Miss Sheboygan and Miss Watertown, contestants who felt as though they’d let their towns down after not winning Wisconsin’s state pageant.

Simon called them “true dreamers of the American Dream.” They were individuals who cared about their community and country and had the guts to try and lose.
He would stand for them, he said, and “for all the other glorious failures who have made and sustained this country.”

Include Wally Orlinsky on that list.