People, Not Cars

Twenty-five years ago today, it was announced that the McCormick Spice Company would abandon its landmark Inner Harbor building and the Rouse Company would tear it down. Yes, I wrote everything east of the coma in that sentence three years ago and can't improve upon or add anything to that post (just below this one), except to mention, that as of five days ago, across the street at the new McCormick World of Flavors store in the sad McAnywhere that Harborplace has become, one can buy a snow globe ornament - in honor of the company's 125th anniversary, according to its Facebook page - depicting McCormick's demolished headquarters building, with its birth and beaten-to-death years bizarrely featured prominently). I still remember 8 December 1988 in detail, as my attention in an instant swerved from my new store, opened just two weeks prior, to the immediate task of attempting to harness the outrage of a shocked citizenry. Following an epic battle and a lost lawsuit, a 24-year-old parking lot with a billion dollar view nonsensically remains the highest and best use of this prime site.

Forty years after the Inner Harbor's first spectacular party, the third annual City Fair; 37 years after the tall ships celebrated the bicentennial; 33 years after the opening of the then-groundbreaking festival marketplace that originally was Harborplace; a year after maybe the most glorious event of all, Sailibration - and for countless July 4th and New Year's Eve fireworks displays; Pier Six Pavilion concerts; visits to the National Aquarium, Maryland Science Center, and historic ships - crowds continue to find their way to the Inner Harbor, mostly without motoring right up to it. With more people walking, biking and using public transportation, such as the free Circulator buses, it's time to work towards the elimination of unsightly surface parking lots, including the waterfront one just north of the Pier Six Pavilion. Certainly, we need no new parking structures.

On 5 May 2011 at the groundbreaking for whimsical Pierce's Park, Governor Martin O'Malley stated, as an aside to his prepared remarks, that the 650-space Pier Five parking garage looming over the park site was a huge mistake. Yet somehow Waterfront Partnership's recently announced Inner Harbor 2.0 plan presents this usually one-third empty garage as ripe for what looks to be a doubling in size, in exchange for eliminating the aforementioned adjacent 180-space parking lot.

The loss of the McCormick Building in some ways upsets me less than that, a quarter century on, the road to improving the Inner Harbor is still peppered with such poor planning.