Little more than 15 years ago, it seemed pretty far-fetched stuff: glass pavilions, boutique shops, food courts, brick promenades on the harbor, Baltimore's harbor, where commerce once meant big ships packed with sugar, fruit, coal.
Today, Harborplace seems anything but far-fetched. The radical has become routine, the model copied with varying degrees of success from the suburbs to cities across the United States.
Baltimore's darling, coddled by the city and toasted by Time magazine in its infancy, has grown into an adolescent facing an identity crisis borne of a simple question: how to keep the customers coming back.
More than anything, that question underlies the Rouse Co.'s ambitious $20 million proposal to redesign and renovate its jewel at Pratt and Light streets as an ever-growing menu of attractions compete for consumers' time, attention and, most important, dollars.
Restaurants such as American Cafe, flush with success at Harborplace, have branched out into the suburbs. Food courts have spread in vast spaces at shopping malls everywhere. Cities from Norfolk, Va., to San Francisco have looked to Baltimore's model when redeveloping waterfronts. Closer to Harborplace's home, new attractions are bursting out all over downtown Baltimore, from a children's museum being designed by the creative geniuses at Walt Disney Co. to the new Visionary Arts Museum to a major retail and entertainment complex planned for the neighboring Power Plant.
Frank Hopkins, one of the original Harborplace tenants, stood amid the rows of Baltimore and Maryland souvenirs in his Maryland Bay Company shop yesterday and summed up comments expressed from Rouse headquarters in Columbia to neighboring hotels and tourist attractions.
"What worked here went other places," he said. "Now, we need to do something to bring customers back, to make a brand new Harborplace."
Rouse, the Columbia-based developer, is acutely aware of the need. "You have to reinvent these things to keep people coming back again and again, to keep people coming back to the city," said Robert Minutoli, a Rouse senior vice president overseeing the proposed project.
On Wednesday, Rouse asked the state and city to pick up two-thirds of the projected $20 million cost of the project.
The request came with a warning: Harborplace stands at a crossroads and needs a facelift and redesign to maintain its competitive edge and role as a key economic boon that has generated $1 billion in sales, $50 million in state tax revenue and $12 million in city real estate taxes.
