Last year, one of Baltimore’s stalwart financial firms left a Pratt Street office building in the central business district for a new headquarters in Harbor East.
Was this bad for downtown?
To some city officials, T. Rowe Price and its 2,000 employees were actually affirming their commitment to downtown, moving from one part of it to another.
Deciding what is — and isn’t — downtown can be a fun bar game, but words have meaning. What we consider downtown often reflects what we most value in a city. Is it pro sports and tourism? Office buildings and nightlife? Shopping districts and City Hall?
One version of downtown Baltimore is a depressing and increasingly empty collection of tall buildings. Another is a dynamic and diverse community poised for success.
What counts as ‘downtown Baltimore’? You tell us.
No one seems to agree which parts of the city make up downtown. Now you get to weigh in. Draw downtown and help us decide once and for all.
The city’s own maps offer conflicting accounts. Baltimore’s planning department has a map that carves the city into more than 250 neighborhoods. It includes a relatively small version of “Downtown” and something called “Downtown West” (which is south of downtown).
Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration has a master plan for downtown that features a much larger swath of Central Baltimore.
The city also has a business improvement district for downtown: the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. Its official boundaries kind of look like an upturned anvil with something sticking out the top, but the partnership considers everything within a one-mile radius of Light and Pratt streets to be downtown.
Hello, residents of Pigtown, Riverside and Mount Vernon. It turns out you’ve been living downtown this whole time.
Cities across the country use similar measuring sticks to define their downtowns, said Downtown Partnership President Shelonda Stokes, because downtowns cannot be neatly delineated. The term is more about describing an interconnected area that can cover multiple neighborhoods and evolve over time, she said.
What is downtown Baltimore?
Otis Rolley, president and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corp., said downtown is everything from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Harbor Point — adding that most Baltimoreans would agree with him.
Actually, most Baltimoreans can’t seem to agree on much of anything when it comes to downtown.
To Kenneth Greene, 70, who works at 100 S. Charles St., downtown is supposed to be “a gathering place for the common man.” Fells Point is not downtown, Greene said, but the Inner Harbor is. Mount Vernon? “Not really.”
If downtown is where the nightlife is, then Fells Point is part of downtown, said 26-year-old Julian Ayangco, who moved to the city two years ago and lives in Roland Park.
Griff Volker, 29, said he lives downtown, meaning Federal Hill. He studies geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The transportation systems, the network of roads, the culture and density of housing define a downtown. Volker’s personal map of downtown extends to Canton.
“Downtown is not covered by the laws of physics,” said Charles Duff, a developer, author, lifelong urbanophile and former president of development nonprofit Jubilee Baltimore. “Downtown is pretty much whatever people say it is.”
Decades ago, Duff said, he heard a story of a man who bought a winning lottery ticket from a store in Charles Village. But after a local radio DJ said the winning ticket had been purchased downtown, the man threw away a scrap of paper worth $3.5 million.
Luckily, the store kept a record of his purchase, but “he was almost a martyr to the confusion of the boundaries over downtown Baltimore,” Duff said.
According to Duff, H.L. Mencken defined downtown as the front office of civilization. To Duff, “It’s where you take your Aunt Marge when she visits for the first time from Ohio.”
If these different definitions give you a headache, blame New York.
America’s largest city by population was originally just the borough of Manhattan, which is a long, skinny island along the Hudson River. The Dutch settled at its southern tip, which eventually became the start of downtown.
As the city grew north along the island, Duff said, people moved up into an area that logically became known as “uptown.” In between those areas became “midtown,” he said, which also makes sense.
Most other U.S. cities have adopted the same terminology, though there are exceptions. (Charlotte, North Carolina, calls its office core “Uptown.”)
The problem is that most cities with a “downtown” are not long, skinny islands where development moved along a single plane. They are blobs. And these blobs often radiate outward in all directions from a single point, like Baltimore.
That makes defining a downtown “squishy,” Duff said.
Duff seemed reluctant to say something nice about Philadelphia (the “world’s biggest Baltimore”), but he acknowledged that the City of Brotherly Love made a smart decision in the middle of the 20th century.
Instead of copying New York, Duff said, Philadelphians decided to innovate — they called the center of their city “Center City.”
Duff said this term has allowed for a broader, less controversial understanding of Philadelphia’s core, which has changed and grown over time and encompasses distinct neighborhoods.
Back in Baltimore, the debate over downtown still simmers.
“I consider Otterbein to be a part of downtown,” Duff said. “I don’t know if you do, or if anybody else does, but I do.”
Heck, Duff said, maybe that DJ was right. Maybe even Charles Village is downtown.
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