September 07, 2011|Dan Rodricks
What a bunch of grumpy gills we have in this town. What a bunch of whine lovers. Baltimore just played host to an amazing weekend event, unlike anything seen here since mustachioed men rebuilt downtown after the Great Fire of 1904. And what do we get? Drizzly rain on the parade.
It's suggested that neither the crowds nor the TV audiences were as big as the promoters say. Not all the hotels sold out — the one on Fayette Street was only 90 percent of capacity. Sales of steamed crabs at a restaurant a mile away were slow. What else? Is there anything else about the first Baltimore Grand Prix that needs to be dissed?
Oh, yes, they had to cut down some trees so people could see the races.
And the traffic last week, before the race — it was deplorable. The breathless TV reporters, still in their hurricane-terror mode, said so.
What a bunch of Eeyores. Must be the same coots complaining about the Terps' wild new football uniforms: "Why would they wanna go and do that fer?"
Whenever Baltimore is poised to get a little too big for its britches — "above its raisin'" — somebody's right there to try and hold the old palatinate in check. This is Nickel Town, and don't y'all forget it.
Meanwhile, Jay Davidson and others who developed the Grand Prix and pulled it off without calamity deserve applause.
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the mayor who supported it even as her constituents groaned about trees and traffic, is allowed to take a victory lap. Had William Donald Schaefer been mayor, he would have stuck his tongue out at the naysayers and rode shotgun in the pace car. Ms. Rawlings-Blake took the risk of supporting the races a week before the city's primary election. Had the BGP been a disaster, some voters might have held it against her. But it wasn't, so she gets to bask in the glory for a couple of days.
As for the economic impact of the BGP, that shouldn't be measured only by hotel rooms and restaurant meals. There's a lot more to it. The city created a buzz by allowing its best-known public space — the Inner Harbor-to-Camden Yards area — to be used in this unusual way. There was a wonderful festival atmosphere. The images of IndyCars racing past city landmarks were remarkable. People familiar with Harborplace and the B&O Warehouse from Ravens Monday night games will take note and consider us cool. I plan to tell friends in New York and Boston to skip Orioles' games next summer and save their money for the next Grand Prix weekend.
A caution: Economic impact is never what it's cracked up to be with regard to sports events. Economists who have studied this say the entertainment dollar is generally fixed. That is, money spent on a professional football game is money not spent in a restaurant or for a concert. Average people only have so much money for fun.
That it occurs on Labor Day weekend puts the BGP in a unique position, as a sports event, to generate cash on what is usually a sleepy couple of days in Downtown Baltimore. But admission is not free, and so locals might not have other cash to spend in restaurants. (I saw plenty of people picnicking under the trees along Russell Street on Sunday between races, and there were several corporate tents with catered lunches.)
Also, as far as some restaurants not feelin' the Prix to the level they expected: Never dismiss the role local TV plays in scaring people away with predictions of downtown traffic nightmares. (It happened famously on a Saturday night in August 1998 when there was a Ravens preseason home game, a Pete Fountain concert at Pier 6 and a Reba McEntire concert at First Mariner Arena. Hurtin' restaurants complained bitterly about how the media's exaggerated predictions of gridlock hurt their business by up to 50 percent.)
A lot of this will get worked out by next year and — who knows? — maybe the Baltimore Grand Prix will become a big annual event that motorheads around the world put on their calendars and local fun-seekers include in their annual rituals. That won't stop the grouches, of course. But if the BGP gives them something to complain about every September, then they'll probably look forward to it, too.
Dan Rodricks' column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. He is the host of Midday on WYPR 88.1 FM. His email is dan.rodricks@baltsun.com.
