As smoke billows from stacks into lumpy, steel-gray clouds over Baltimore's harbor, Bill Struever pounds through the muddy gravel of a waterfront construction site, simultaneously scanning the morning paper and gulping a cup of coffee - his fourth of the morning.
"12 Schools in City Eyed for Closing," blares the headline.
Struever, president of Struever Bros. Eccles and Rouse, is the city's busiest developer and vice chairman of the Baltimore school board. And tonight the school system, struggling with deficits and declining enrollment, will have its first meeting of the academic year. But right now, Struever doesn't have time to think about that.
It's 6:50 a.m. and he's roaming the former Procter & Gamble soap plant in Locust Point, inspecting its renovation into an office complex called Tide Point. It's the most ambitious project of Struever's quarter-century career as the city's St. Jude of Lost Real Estate, an ideologically driven construction company owner who's made an art out of tapping government programs to renovate old factories and rebuild rundown neighborhoods.
At age 49, Struever is an icon of his generation's hopes for renaissance in Baltimore - an aging hippie who works the city's battered industrial landscape with the creativity of a sculptor determined to fashion something beautiful out of old tires and iceboxes that others have thrown into the alley.
He has hammered tin plants into luxury apartments, carved canneries into high-tech headquarters. Over the last quarter-century, his company has built and renovated about 3,000 homes and converted more than 5 million square feet of old Baltimore factories into offices and stores. It's the equivalent of 100 football fields of furniture warehouses and sailcloth factories turned into contemporary-looking offices for architects, public relations firms, software companies and others.
He's suffered failures - projects that lost money, the near bankruptcy of his company 10 years ago, two broken marriages. Still, he continues to throw himself into risky urban ventures, working sometimes 16 or more hours a day, firing off e-mails at 3 a.m. about wiring or plumbing problems. At times, some say, his zealotry can make him unbearable - a man so caught up in his vision that he becomes self-righteous, grandiose, obsessed about his image and difficult to shut up.
