college town

Photo of Johns Hopkins Commencement by Will Kirk / HIPS, 2007

Earlier today I passed by a group of jubilant looking people in black robes who were either very young judges or newly minted graduates. Trailing a few paces behind were relieved looking people I assume were the parents. It seemed they were all headed off to a celebratory lunch somewhere near the harbor.

Seeing students Downtown is becoming more of a regular thing. Graduate and professional students tend to blend in with the office crowd on the streets, but it's easy to spot a Peabody enrolee lugging an instrument case, a med student in scrubs, a culinary student in their whites, or someone from the School for the Arts or MICA sketching up in Mount Vernon.

Downtown may not fit the stereotypical image of a campus town because there are so many other elements that define its identity (business, tourism, etc.). And we don't really have the leafy campus with the Georgian architecture and fraternity row. But Downtown Baltimore is a college town all the same.

Consider this: there are nine academic institutions that ring Downtown. Of the approximately 160,000 people in Downtown on any given day, 20,000 of them are students. That's about the size of Cornell, and twice as large as the undergraduate population at Harvard.

-mike

new ideas for old arena space

the current arena

Plans for a new Baltimore arena aren't even finalized yet but, to its credit, the Urban Design Committee of Baltimore's American Institute of Architects (AIA) chapter wants to start planning what could go on the current arena site - provided that location isn't used for a new arena.

We've always felt the site (along with the Superblock just to the north) is critical to linking City Center and the Westside. It's a lot of space, it's right next to a light rail stop, and it's convenient to pretty much everything, including the University of Maryland, the Pratt Street corridor, hotels, parks, MARC trains, Camden Yards, the Hippodrome, and Lexington Market.

And there are already thousands of residents living there. In fact, nearby apartment buildings are almost 100% rented. But you'd never guess it because there aren't many people out on the street in the evenings or on weekends. Maybe that's because there's not much to draw people out. The Howard Street side of the arena is one huge blank wall.

The AIA committee would like to see that change and, today, informally presented some trial balloon ideas to replace the current structure with mixed use developments that engage the surrounding neighborhood and encourage year-round pedestrian activity.

The Partnership is one of the groups pushing for a new arena and our president, Kirby Fowler, sits on the city panel that will ultimately decide where a new arena will be located. Once that's settled, the city will begin to entertain options about how to use the current space. But it's never too soon to start thinking big.

-mike