20 December 2007

Fade To Black

For twenty-one years, the North Charles Street windows of the Craig Flinner Gallery have brimmed with large, graphic, colorful antique French posters, bringing a particular joie de vivre to the street. Inside, the walls are jammed with more posters, maps, and paintings and share space with antique and vintage furniture, architectural salvage, ephemera, and other surprises. Glorious colors and patterns and textures abound. This is the type of sophisticated, yet affordable shopping Baltimore City needs more of, so the news that the gallery will close its doors in March, after a total of twenty-five years in Mount Vernon, should send the Downtown Partnership, Charles Street Development Corporation, Historic Charles Street Association, Baltimore Development Corporation, and Mayor Sheila Dixon into overdrive.

Businesses catering to the carriage trade once lined North Charles Street, though shifting demographics and fear of crime shuttered many decades ago. Still, retail persevered along what was often known as Baltimore's Fifth Avenue. The confidence Harborplace inspired marched north, and the gallery was just one of many new retail ventures opened in the 1980s and 1990s, flourishing and expanding several times over.

But in the past few years, the retail climate changed, and not just along Charles Street. The homogenization and relative convenience of the mall shopping experience, whether prized by consumers or forced down our throats or both, siphoned off ever-increasing numbers of shoppers more interested in being able to go to any Williams-Sonoma in Anytown, USA to buy the exact copper cookie cutter set shown on page six of the catalogue, and to carry purchases to their cars parked for free in mall lots (even if the distance to the door measures in multiple city blocks). Retail has further evolved/regressed in some markets as consumers have tired of the antiseptic sameness of enclosed malls and fake main streets have popped up. Some are built in faux architectural styles and others make no pretense, but the stores are still mostly interchangeable from strip to strip.

As Charles Street retail moved out, more offices and restaurants moved in. While not a bad thing in and of itself, the lack of a critical mass of shops created a downward spiral in the number of shoppers. Combined with the ever-persistent parking shortage, Mr. Flinner, a Baltimore City resident and true-blue advocate of cities, made the wrenching decision to pack up and move. He understands the pall his darkened, cavernous retail space will cast over the neighborhood, yet he is powerless to fix what ails this main street, including customers who are increasingly more interested in the Disney version offered at White Marsh and Hunt Valley, where everything is predictable and the colors are all the same.

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