Frederick, MD - long-term planning bearing fruit

Frederick, Maryland has long been known as a historic little jewel of a town (founded 1745)characterized by its many church steeples. Still, when I first visited there in the late eighties, it was a provincial backwater with a sleepy main street and the typical neglected urban core. Famous places where the historic Schifferstadt house (which my wife claims to have been built by her ancestors from Germany;  she, indeed, still has remote cousins who live in Schifferstadt, Germany) and the Barbara Fritchie Diner on the commercial never lands of US 40. (the real Barbara Fritchie Hosue is in the historic town). Then all investment occurred in the suburbs. At least so it seemed. But it was already back then when a forward looking mayor laid the groundwork for the growing and bustling Frederick of today. His name: Ron Young. He had first been elected mayor in 1974 in the young age of 34 and was re-elected several times until his mayoral career came to an end in 1989.

Frederick, town of steeples

Here in city hall visionary plans took shape that took 30 years to bear fruit

Ron Young was big on revitalizing downtown and creating places where the city could grow. Sure enough, Frederick has grown since, it is the fastest growing larger town in Maryland with nearly 25% growth in just one decade between 2000 and 2010. Current size: 65,000 residents, Maryland's second largest incorporated city. (when Young left office in '89, the city had only 40,000 residents).

Young's most famous vision: The Carroll Creek flood control project, a 1.3 mile, $65 million public works undertaking consisting of channeling the flood prone Carrol Creek which traverses the southern part of downtown and crosses Market Street. Young turned this mundane project into a civic amenity while at the same time converting hundreds of acres of floodplain into precious development land. His model: San Antonio, Texas and its Riverwalk. Many thought Young was crazy when he built huge downtown parking garages to free up numerous surface lots for development and even more so when Carroll Creek was contained into a concrete tunnel. For quite some time the town looked as if Frederick should get a subway. But the madness had a method: On top of the cavernous tunnel Young had envisioned his San Antonio inspired scenic waterway flanked by a linear park which in turn would be lined by high density new mixed use development.

Frederick's "Riverwalk" at Carroll Creek

 Today, twenty three years after Young left office and after being Deputy Secretary for Planning at the State, he is now a State Senator. (His son became a local tea-party extremist in Frederick County) Today one can see parts of the Carroll Creek area bustling just like the renderings of the original project had envisioned it. The huge parking garages still seem overblown but there is no mistaking it: Frederick is booming. It's downtown has not only revived, it has outright urban flair. Market Street is full of trendy restaurants, historic buildings are lovingly restored and vacant properties are a rarity.  Frederick, clearly transformed from an outpost to an established element within Washington's commuter radius, even has a real train connecting it to Washington (although on a tortuously slow and circuitous route). The Carroll Creek development zone even has its own brand- new interstate access allowing large tracts of the former Brick Works to become precious development land.

The example of Mayor Young and his beloved Frederick show how important long-term visions and how important well crafted strategies and ground-rules are for the future of a city . Without such strategies cities become opportunity driven beggars who have to change course with each developer who knocks on the door of the mayor's office. With longterm concepts in place mayors can change but the course remains charted.

New residential development south of Carroll Creek

Historic hidden nooks in downtown Frederick: Church garden

Well maintained stately historic buildings line the streets

South Market Street busy and lively until late

 Frederick City location in Frederick County

1991 Carroll Creek Masterplan byJWA, courtesy of the City of Frederick, Carroll Creek RFP 2003

All photos copyright by ArchPlan Inc.

Architects In Their Community - a Presentation

AIA held this year's annual national convention in the District of Columbia between 5/16 and 5/19. During this time when thousands of architects converged on DC's new convention center keynote sessions, educational seminars, receptions and trade floor shows were held by the hundreds. Educational sessions follow an elaborate almost year-long process of submission, evaluation and selection before they will be permitted.

I had submitted the idea that urban design committees associated with local AIA chapters would show how the volunteer architects working with them had influenced their cities.

As session leader I organized two sessions with six cities presenting, session one featuring Los Angeles, Detroit and Baltimore, session 2 featuring Boston, New York and Seattle.

Below I insert the text that was shown in the convention brochure and the learning objectives we had posted for coninuing education credits as well as the text of the Baltimore related presentation which I gave.

Please excuse the font mishmash which results from cut and paste and poor font control inside Blogger.
Session Description

How can the interdisciplinary and holistic knowledge of the architect be leveraged to solve urban problems? What do local AIA chapters contribute? Learn how architects and AIA components have been effective in their community in three cities across the nation as:

·       activists for the community,

·       advocates for good design and

·       ambassadors for their profession.

In this session learn how architects in Baltimore, Detroit and Los Angeles tackled huge urban problems such as shrinkage, disinvestment, post industrial restructuring (Baltimore, Detroit) or the lack of an urban planning culture in a sprawling metropolis (Los Angeles). See how issues of health, sustainability, place making and the value of good design are common issues from east to west. See how local chapters through volunteer activities have shaped their cities and regions in the process and built credibility for the profession with government agencies and the public alike.

Speakers: Michael Lehrer, FAIA, Los Angeles. Michael Poris, AIA, Detroit. Klaus Philipsen, FAIA, Baltimore. Session listing and Speaker bios see here. Find session TH 201 on Thursday 2:00pm.

Learning Objectives:

1.Recognize and identify a range of urban challenges

2.Identify needs and challenges in your own community

3.Identify & employ strategies to engage community

4.How to Work with City leaders and staff committees

Working Outside the Practice: Architects in their community

Note: The images referenced in the brackets can be seen here.

[image: Baltimore Intro]
Few cities evoke a range of sentiments like Baltimore. From “mobtown” to “Charm  City”. Baltimore’s self confidence was at times so shaken that a “believe” posters were plastered all over the city. [image]

I will give you a very quick intro to Baltimore, the Canvas for our AIA Urban Design Committee then want to speak in more detail about the UDC.  If I go over some slides too fast and you would like something explained please holler right there and then.

Strictly from a size point of view, Baltimore’s star has, indeed, been falling. From second largest city in 1850 to rank #22 in 2010 [image].

From a pinnacle of almost 1 million people in 1950 to a bit over 600,000 now  while the state of Maryland more than doubled its population  in the same period.

Parallel Baltimore lost 2/3 of its manufacturing jobs. During WW II Bethlehem steel [image] was the largest employer in the area with over 40,000 people working at Sparrows point. Today world famous Johns Hopkins employs about the same number.

The  annual  budget of Hopkins exceeds the one of the city of Baltimore. [image]

Lesson 1: While the region continues to grow, the city has at best plateau-ed. Meanwhile the city and the region successfully transformed from “smokestack” to a city with leading universities and medical institutions, still maintaining a high level of authenticity.  [image MICA] When, I came to America in 1986 I found Baltimore way more authentic than its sibling and rival on the Potomac.

How did these trends shape the City? [figure ground]

Like in most US cities, the general bleeding out to the suburbs [image DC and Balto Metro Areas 1953 and 1992] was accompanied by internal bleeding from urban freeway and urban renewal surgeries. Exurban sprawl  and internal de-densification [image Baltimore figure ground 1958 and 1988] worked hand in hand.

In the 50 ties architects and planners, among them the infamous Robert Moses, were busy drawing up Corbusian style visions for Baltimore with urban expressways [image] even across crossing even the Inner Harbor and, slab towers replacing rowhouses . [image].

While slab tower housing projects, indeed, rose around downtown Baltimore [image], Baltimore was the scene of fierce freeway battles which ultimately saved historic Fells Point and Federal Hill , both today not only tourist destinations but also growing neighborhoods. [image Fells Pt]

 

Urban renewal also brought first a Mies van de Rohe tower to Charles Center and then an early Ian Pei tower to the Baltimore Inner Harbor[image]. Here, urban  renewal “made in Baltimore”  defined for the entire world what one can do with an obsolete  industrial urban waterfront.

Another trend setting “grand project” was Oriole Park Oriole Park [image] once again defining a new urban prototype, “the downtown ballpark” which became a must-have for many cities.

 Baltimore was also a trailblazer in turning old factories into incubators, luxury condos and mixed- use centers. [image] The old Proctor and Gamble soap factory is now Under Armour, [image] a rising star in sports apparel with $1.5 b in annual revenues. Downtown has become a neighborhood with so many residences filing obsolete class B or C office spaces [image] that Baltimore is  #8 in the US in terms of downtown residents.

 

Lesson 2: Baltimore has given the world urban design and architectural innovation.  Baltimore proves that preservation and adaptive re-use can accommodate demographic shifts towards a knowledge city.

                    

Of course, not all is well. The population loss brought not only a concentration of poverty, crime and disenfranchised communities but also  over 20,000 vacant housing units, [image] the backdrop for TV shows like “Homicide” and “The Wire” that Baltimoreons love to hate.  Although the Housing Department,  Community CDCs, churches, investors and speculators   all have tried to fight blight by  turning “vacants to value” success is spotty.

Lesson 3: The conversion from industrial city to knowledge city has left many behind [image] with the result that there are still more shrinking than growing neighborhoods.

 

So this is the “canvas”. How did the  Urban Design Committee of AIA Baltimore operate in this setting? How much of it did we even influence? How did it start and who are we?

The Urban Design Committee [image]

 The Urban Design Committee was founded in 1985 by a group of young architects who wanted to make a difference in Baltimore at a time when Mayor Donald Schaefer propagated “do it now” projects and the city appeared to be once again on the move. This is what it says on our AIA website [image]  and this is what it said early on in the papers. [image]

There is a great deal that the UDC did since 1985 and I found it difficult to select  what to present here as useful to you. Bread and butter stuff such as clear messages in the media. [image: op-ed], Best practice conferences or arcane items such as zoning?[image]. Or policy papers like this one on Sustainability ?[image].  I decided to focus on two themes: “Connect” (if this doesn’t make you whince already) and “Design Matters” [image]

Under “connect” I have two “projects” which we did early on in our history, the “Second Waterfront” project and the “Downtown Renaissance” project.

 In 1990 the Urban Design Committee expanded on the Inner Harbor lesson by addressing Baltimore’s “other waterfront”, the sleepy and muddy Middle Branch. We did this with a now quaint looking hand-drawn “report” [image].  With it the UDC established a  brand-new way of thinking about a up to then  neglected stretch of waterfront. We tied the baseball and football stadium projects to the renewal of industrial wastelands bordering the Middle Branch. That was by no means as obvious then as it may seem. This area is cut off from downtown by a tangle of elevated freeway bridges and is[image] flanked by two disinvested communities, Westport and Cherry Hill.

          Results: In 2007 the Planning Department adopts the Middle Branch master plan. Yes, you heard this correctly, I said 2007, which is 17 years after we published the initial vision. Sometimes it takes a long time to affect things as a volunteer group. [image] But once it takes, it takes. Since 2007, a private developer initiated a $ 1.4 billion 50 acre  mixed use development. [image] Today, the Middle Branch is already been transformed. The freeways are still there but several hulking factories  have been leveled, a greenway has been created along the shore and the Ravens stadium has started to open up the area.

The second connect –story has more pieces and  deals with downtown   [image]

Urban Design Committees of any chapter AIA will have more affinity with downtown, no matter how much the slogan might be “neighborhoods first” since downtown is the planning district which very architect knows.

So it makes sense for UDCs to deal with downtown.

 Like many US city downtowns, Baltimore’s downtown was ailing. So, in 1993 the UDC formed 6 working groups, divided the central city up into six districts and organized six town meetings. And unlike previous downtown efforts, we included in each district the adjacent neighborhoods.

The town meetings were attended by hundreds of citizens and stakeholders. Each town meeting started with a presentation of major ideas from the UDC followed by panel discussions. 

The results of all six events were published in a booklet called “the Renaissance Continues”.  Many big ideas proposed by the six UDC-led design groups became trailblazers for years afterwards. The UDC project brought us a National AIA Component Excellence award.

As you recall, the Moses plan [image] was the opposite of connect, it should be have been called the downtown choker plan. Bypass roads and the public housing highrises choking downtown an all sides. UDC addressed this in three ways:

1.     We embraced an idea of Walter Sondheim (a kind of Jane Jacobs of Baltimore) to demolish the final stretch of the elevated Interstate I-83 that comes into downtown from the north and lands rather abruptly since luckily the bridge over the Inner Harbor had been defeated in the freeway battles. [image]  The idea depicted here is that the thing might just as well come down to grade a ½ mile earlier and become an urban boulevard ending the divide between downtown and the east side.

2.     Although it was not the UDC’s idea that these complexes should be imploded, this was planned as part of the HOPE programs. At the time HUD who paid for the HOPE programs was so much ahead of our housing department’s plans, that it threatened to cut the money off. The Housing commissioner called us, the UDC,  to help and so it came that the  UDC assisted in 5 charettes [image] with housing tenants and the public to define how redevelopment can better connect.

                   

3.     Thirdly, the Universities: Both, the University of Maryland at Baltimore and the University of Baltimore operated strictly as a commuter campus,  and their respective campus acted as a barrier. Both participated in our town hall meetings where we suggested with these type sketches that they should reach out into the communities and breach the barriers.

Results:

·       The JFX is still elevated but the topic is still active and more detailed studies since proved that better connections can add value. [image]

·       All highrise housing developments were imploded [image] and replaced with low rise mixed income and some mixed use development reconnecting the urban grid.

·       The then Mayor and now Governor O’Malley trumped the UDC idea of university outreach with an even bigger vision, the creation of two biotechnology parks, one east of downtown springing from the Hopkins medical complex and one to the west as an offspring of UM medical complexjust as the UDC had suggested. Today both technology parks are well underway and both universities are invested in their neighboring communities. [image]

·       UB has reached out to the north and developed two large parking lots. [image]

·       Another result: With downtown now much less hemmed in, we were able to make it a neighborhood and prove that Preservation is Economic Development. Let me explain how:

Baltimore’s west side [image]was Baltimore’s historic garment district with beautiful cast iron buildings. Until the early sixties it was also the regional retail hub as is visible on the this plan cover.  In the seventies a lot of the Westside ended up vacant and was left to rot. After several false starts with transit malls and the like in the nineties a grand renewal plan was proposed, and, in spite of all earlier fights still with large scale demolition at the core. 

UDC teamed up with Preservation Maryland, Baltimore Heritage and other preservationists in a highly political maneuver that ultimately made yielded a Memorandum of Agreement that showed over 100 westside buildings to be protected [image] and gave the UDC a seat on an advisory panel, both still in effect today. The Westside is far from its potential, but many signs of life in existing buildings are most encouraging. Preservation as Economic Development was just last year confirmed as a valid strategy by ULI and their national action team that had advised on the Baltimore Westside.

Architects like to think that  DESIGN MATTERS.  Let’s see how the UDC sprang into action as a watchdog when the city wanted butcher a nationally recognized award winning masterplan [image].

             

At Inner Harbor East, the area of a former sawmill that had burned down spectacularly the do-it now Mayor Schaefer had seen the potential for this land as early as the mid eighties. A lot of tax dollars were spent to prepare the site and  have Ehrenkrantz and Eckstut design a masterplan just as beautiful as their plan  for Battery Park in NYC.

 After years of sitting on the development-ready land, the owner, a bakery magnate and reluctant developer, came out of the gate with a “convention center hotel” that was almost 500 feet high. Problem was, the thing was about ¾ of a mile away from the convention center and worse, it violated the Eckstut plan by being three times higher than the height limit of development plus it sat right at the water’s edge where Eckstut had envisioned the lower buildings leaving a view from behind.

So the UDC organized a media blitz culminating in a 1997 public forum in with Stan Eckstut as the speaker.  

Result: ten floors of the hotel were lobbed off. Today Harbor East is a vibrant second downtown on the waterfront, the layout just like the masterplan,but the tall guys in the front row still cut off sun and view. [image]

As a result from this experience, we thought that there is a need to teach about the value of  Design and initiated a”Design Matters”  lecture series that is going on to this day. Each year as part of  AIA’s Architecture Month the UDC organizes the keynote lecture on the value of good design and good planning. [image]

 

In our quest to make  Design part of the DNA of Baltimore, we also helped found the Baltimore Design Center. D center now  in its third year has a NEA grant, has a gallery and  organizes monthly “Design Conversations” in which the value of design is presented in interdisciplinary presentations in which we were able to reach way beyond our traditional AIA base.

42 Design Conversations were held to date.

In conclusion:

During nearly 30 years the UDC grew from a gadfly and watchdog to become a resource and partner. This relatively small group of maybe a dozen volunteer architects managed to make a difference in their city where mayors and planning directors changed while this group remained stable. In fact I have been co-chair for 18 years.

It is our goal to move ourselves and our city away from opportunity driven, reactive action to forward looking real “planning”.  Demographics speak for a bright future of US cities, worldwide trends of urbanization continue.

Looking forward we suggest [image] that recapturing residents is the closest thing to a “silver bullet” that any post industrial shrinking city can get in order to recover and reinvent itself, especially if you live in a city that sits in the center of a growing region.

Starting three Mayors back,  UDC made growing Baltimore back a major topic. Finally, in late 2011, in her inaugural address Mayor Rawlings Blake declared  the “growth challenge” a significant goal of her administration. In the coming years UDC will work with her to make this happen.

 [image]

 The city and region successfully transformed from legacy “smokestack” to meds and eds. 

The conversion from industrial city to knowledge city tends to leave many behind

Architects can occupy new territory with creativity

AIA needs to reach out beyond its traditional base

Sometimes success comes from coalition building, not from drawing pretty stuff

Strategy and vision is important -  lead don’t just re-act

Think more about good things to add than about bad things to subtract

Use an “all of the above” approach for your type of  involvement

Collaborate with others and form coalitions

Stay curious, remain open, do research- Get involved!

Architects of Healing - a Postscript

The 2012 National Convention of AIA in Washington DC closed with an impressive ceremony titled "The Architects of Healing" in which the architects and designers of the memorials and structures in Shanksville PA, the Pentagon and the WTC were honored. All those listed below were present and those with an asterik spoke at the event, many remembering their first hand experience of the attacks on the WTC.

Robert Davidson, FAIA STV NY WTC/PATH*

Daniel Libeskind, AIA WTC*

David Childs, FAIA SOM*

Michael Arad, AIA , Memorial*

Craig Edward Dykers, AIA Snohetta, memorial Garden*

Steven Davis, FAIA, Brody Bond*

Santiago Calatrava, FAIA, PATH*

Paul Murdoch, AIA flight 93 memorial

Juli Beckmann, Pentagon Memorial

Keith Kaseman

Ridgely Dixon, AIA RTKL

Craig Morgan,AIA

Christopher Fromboluti, AIA

Ronald Fiedler, FAIA RTKL

Mary Oehrlein, FAIA, Pentagon Phoenix Project.

To see all those luminaries on stage and hear them speak I couldn't forget the troubles during the design process which brought a lot of quarrels and probably animosities. However, not one speaker today indicated any misgivings about the outcome, nobody fired any broadside, not even small arrows. This, in itself made this celebration memorable even when, on a beautiful sunny day in May, it wasn't easy to withdraw into the darkness of the gigantic ballroom and tolerate the deep emotional immersion into the events that lead to the death of so many. Of course, the day they died had started with a blue sky as well; and so it was the probably the least we convention attendees could do, to listen and to remember and pay respect to those who died and to those who worked hard on creating a future for these places afterwards.

 On the other hand I felt a good bit of unease about the patriotism continually showered on us for three mornings in a row starting with singing "America the Beautiful" at the opening ceremony. I always thought that it was the role of the architect to ask critical questions rather than being strictly affirmative.

Still, leaving the closing ceremony I felt way less cynical than after the tour of the World Trade Center site when I wrote the blog of 3/16/12.

In this sense this is a postscript that needs to be read and seen with the original report as proof of the difficulty to come to terms with both, the tragedy of 9/11 and its architectural response.

"Architects of Healing" being honored at AIA 2012 in Washington DC

Daniel Libeskind and David Childs side by side

Memorial designer Michael Arad

Museum Designer Craig Edward Dykers of Snohetta

All photos copyright ArchPlan Inc.

It takes a successful city for a pedestrian mall to work

As often, today's Atlantic Cities blog reminded me of a topic that has been on my mind for a long time: The urban pedestrian mall and its success in Europe and its usual failure in the US.
Cities makes no mention of the ubiquitous and successful European pedestrian streets  and why they have such a hard time in the US?  (maybe the term "pedestrain mall" is the death knell"?) We are trying to take our streets back from cars, propagate mixed use and downtown living all across the country, so what is up with the maligned pedestrian malls?.

Maybe it isn't that a ped mall can save a city but that an unsuccessful city can't really have a successful ped mall? Maybe we also need to look at the temporary pedestrian streets like Burbon Street in New Orleans (closed to traffic in the evening), the streets closed for farmers markets and study why they work? Ah, and Denver's 16th Street notwithstanding, "transit malls", those bastards of planning, where bulky buses and pedestrians are set up for a shot-gun marriage. Can they really work?

I find the term "mall" odd for a street that is closed to cars. I really don't like malls (see an earlier blog about those), but I like pedestrian streets. How come, we keep repeating the "rule" that ped malls don't work in America right when we are trying to give pedestrians and bicyclists more some space back?

Two things come immediately to mind: Firstly the usually pretty pathetic state of retail in most American cities due to the suburban mall and its derivatives which killed urban shopping. I mean, who in this country still goes shopping downtown (outside of Manhattan)? Secondly, the typical lack of transit. A good pedestrian street needs alternative ways for getting around.Thirdly: The rise and downfall of the ped mall in the US coincided with a period in which downtown was devoid of residential use. So after the offices led out and the stores closed, the ped mall was dead and became the domain of the undesirables.

European cities score pretty well on the first two counts, they have less sprawl and greenfield shopping and thus healthier downtown retail and most cities have a lot more transit and biking than we do. As far as residential use, I don't have numbers  for European Cities (and they probably vary widely, Berlin or Paris, for example, always had a lot of housing very close to shopping, London maybe less so) but we might very well be ahead with converting old class B office space into housing or placing new housing towers into failing retail or financial blocks. Even Tribecca in NYC is a neighborhood now.

The irony is that, while we consider housing as the fix for the ailing downtowns, the need for services good shopping and "people spaces" increases. More people are walking around and a safe and vibrant space for pedestrians (sidewalk eating!) is again in demand just when the last pedestrian mall has been re-converted to a street for cars.

Maybe it is not so far fetched to think that as our cities become again more mixed use and less auto oriented, the pedestrian street will rise once again as well. Not as a quick fix for a failing city, but as a response to an actual need. What it has been in European cities all along.

Picture gallery of pedestrian streets, abroad, in the US, successul and less so:

Copenhagen, Denmark

Flensburg, Germany

Heidenheim, Germany

Istanbul, Turkey

Copenhagen, Denmark

Stuttgart, Germany

Herrenberg, Germany

Bethesda Row, Maryland

Boston, Mass

Boulder, Co

Denver, Co

New York City (Times Square)
See this opinion piece: Link

Failed Oldtown Mall, Baltimore

San Francisco, California







all photos copyright ArchPlan Inc.