WALTER Sondheim Jr. scans the city's waterfront from his 17th-floor office overlooking the Inner Harbor.
His eyes -- still sharp at age 93 -- fall first on an SUV improbably parked on a landscaped median strip across from the water. They then settle on a trailer that serves as a visitors center and a nondescript, low-slung building that together mar the harbor's western shore -- structures he says should never have been put up.
"Who's in charge of the shoreline?" Sondheim, a senior adviser to the Greater Baltimore Committee and a civic treasure, asked this week. "Whose job is it to worry about public areas, what goes on?"
As summer approaches, these are not likely to be the questions foremost in the minds of visitors traditionally drawn to the city's waterfront by warm weather and vacation time.
But they are of concern to city officials and business leaders.
Two months ago, the city's economic development agency selected a New York firm to create a master plan for the area around the harbor, the city's most valuable and visible real estate.
And, at the behest of Mayor Martin O'Malley, the GBC has been examining since January how better to coordinate the management and development of the city's waterfront -- functions divided among several city agencies, which meet on an ad hoc basis once a month.
The problem isn't that waterfront development is stagnating -- the GBC's Web site lists more than $1 billion in investments planned or under construction from Canton to Key Highway -- but that the city's role and operation is too fragmented.
Though the GBC's recommendations are a couple of months away, Sondheim suggests a solution -- a single office to oversee work on everything from land use to infrastructure.
That's the way it was when Sondheim helped spearhead the development of downtown and the Inner Harbor during the more than two decades he spent overseeing Charles Center Inner Harbor Management, the bulk of it as the organization's chairman.
"We weren't brighter," he said of himself and his cohorts. "What we had was a limited job to do. All we had to do was worry about the Inner Harbor."
Sondheim worries not just as a past official and current GBC adviser but as a denizen of the waterfront. A lifelong Baltimorean, he has spent the past 15 years living near the water, eight of them in Canton and the past seven in HarborView off Key Highway.
When he joined Charles Center Inner Harbor Management in 1970, he had just retired as senior vice president of Hochschild, Kohn & Co. and was in the midst of a career of public service that included stints as chairman of the old Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Commission and head of the city and state school boards.
When he left, it was because O'Malley's predecessor, former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, merged the agency into the Baltimore Development Corp.
"Bad mistake," Sondheim said.
He offers his views reluctantly and without rancor, for that is his way. Modest and self-deprecating, he emphasizes his advanced years, not his acuity; a sign in his office proclaims the adage "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."
He is the first to admit not everything was done right in his day, noting the failure to do more along Lombard Street, a block from the water. He finds some of what's going on, such as the plans for the expansion of the National Aquarium, to his liking. And he acknowledges times have changed, with the city no longer controlling waterfront land as it did in the past.
Still, Sondheim says the city has to use tax breaks and other incentives to exercise more influence "than it has in the recent past over what happens." O'Malley, he says, "inherited rather easygoing control of development." Asked for an example, he notes the Schmoke administration's decision to allow a hotel to be built at Inner Harbor East.
And he worries that the BDC seems to be taking charge of waterfront planning, making clear that his anxiety stems not from the abilities of agency head M.J. "Jay" Brodie but from the breadth of his responsibilities.
"I have a real concern about the fact that his plate is so full of things to do," Sondheim said. "It's more likely to be an agency being reactive to a proposal that's been made, rather than proactive."
And he says he has a concern about "separating the management and planning."
He is not apologetic about his passion for the waterfront.
"I worked at Charles Center Inner Harbor for a long time," he said. "I care about it."
