Charles Center was "the beginning of Baltimore's renaissance," said Martin Millspaugh, former chief executive of Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corp.
The plan for Charles Center was unveiled when the city was close to its population peak - it had an all-time high of 949,708 residents in 1950, compared with 651,154 by 2000 - but downtown had begun showing signs of disinvestment.
Businesses were leaving for the counties. Employment was down. No major buildings had been constructed in the central business district for 30 years. Just before Christmas 1954, O'Neill's closed at Charles and Lexington Streets - the first of half a dozen department stores that would eventually leave downtown, the region's premier retail destination before suburban malls and "avenue-style" shopping centers.
Two years before, a blue-ribbon panel called the Commission on Governmental Economy and Efficiency Baltimore published a report on the city's financial plight. It concluded that the city would soon reach a point at which the growth in the assessable tax base through rising values and new development would not match the deterioration in the value and assessment of older properties.
"Unless radical action is taken," the commission warned, "the municipal corporation will be bankrupt within a generation."
That dire warning led to the creation of the Greater Baltimore Committee, a group of civic leaders intent on reversing the decline by harnessing the power of the business community. They formed a planning council to devise ways to increase the tax base by rebuilding the city's core.
The planners decided to focus on a dilapidated commercial area between the city's retail and financial centers. The boundaries were Charles Street on the east, Saratoga Street on the north, Liberty Street and Hopkins Place on the west, and Lombard Street on the south. The area was named Charles Center, after Charles Street. A professional planner on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, David Wallace, was hired to create a master plan to guide construction.
Despite the acknowledgment that change was needed, there was also a reluctance to change, a remnant of the local provincialism observed by the writer Gerald W. Johnson before World War II. "Baltimore is unquestionably the great harker back," he wrote. "Baltimore is becoming a modern city, but gosh, how she dreads it."
