While I typically shy away from the obvious topic in my biweekly blogpost, writing about the Grand Prix thrills me. To think, the City of Baltimore annually extends itself through one of the most logistically intensive disruptions to the city for an event that many of us couldn’t be less interested in attending.[1]
In truth, I have no idea if the Grand Prix is a big deal in the world of car racing. Usually, when there’s a somewhat big sporting event, I overhear enough chatter about it that someone is always willing to explain how awesome it is to a doubting bystander: Yankees v. Red Sox, The World Cup, March Madness. For goodness sake, I once found myself in a forty-minute conversation at Fraziers as someone explained the history of MMA and cage fighting. I didn’t come away loving the event of which I was newly enlightened, but I knew it affected someone and had a science behind it. I respected it more.
I have yet to hear anyone defend the Grand Prix and enlighten me of its grandeur and history and the athletic prowess of those athletes who drive those advertisement-splattered vehicles. Therefore I can only assume its justification is so widespread that it needs to go unspoken, or that there is simply nobody around to defend the race. But let’s get beyond my need to understand the purpose or the placement or the importance of this event and move on to curiosity. ‘Let’s just go and see! It will be fun,’ we’d say. But we don’t say that. We leave town, we avoid street closures, and most of us simply don’t care.
The Grand Prix has a focus on tourism. Attracting outside individuals and their spending power is enough of an incentive to warrant the disruption to many of our daily routines in this pre-planned city. If our aim with the Grand Prix is to retrieve tourism dollars, and we do that successfully, then there’s really no justification for the complaints of the residents. If the event were geared towards the entertainment of the Baltimore resident, and we derive no satisfaction from it’s execution, then yes; we’re warranted in our bitching – the objective has failed. However, the Grand Prix is not put on for our enjoyment; the objective is to capture the spending power of others by way of their entertainment to benefit our City’s economic development. If that’s the objective, and we achieve it, then who cares if the average Baltimore resident is happy. If the City is making money, then the outcome fulfills the vision. As the host city, we choose to have our lives disrupted for the benefit of others knowing that we’ll receive some sort of return or bolstered financial stability. Of course, if we reap no economic benefits from the event, we can once again question the validity of having our lives disrupted, but lets put economics aside for a minute.
If we ignore the economic income, or lack thereof. If we ignore the potential of the target audience to capitalize on our hospitality industry. Look at the potential. For a city I often criticize for being too risk averse – Baltimore, look what you’ve done? You’ve committed yourselves to restructuring the traffic pattern, repaving roads, disrupting days of pre-planned commute times and paths for something that majority of your residents don’t care about. Baltimore, this is huge. This shows me that you are capable of doing the unexpected and the initially unfavored. Of temporarily disrupting our lives to execute what you consider to be a worthwhile event. Never mind the event has failed to achieve the projected economic benefit, you did it. It shows me you’re hungry for change and willing to do the initially uncelebrated to get there. It makes me want to stand up with the lost boys and through a glazed look in my eyes, whisper ‘I believe in you, Peter. I believe in you.”
Baltimore, your failure to please people with the Grand Prix and your insistence to keep trying is such a step in the right direction. As much as we may bitch and moan about inconvenience, we want you to succeed. We want you to keep taking risks and doing the unprecedented. Like Sailabration. Sailabration was amazing! There would be people lining the waterfront by the time I got down to my water taxi at 8am. Tourists and residents went down to the water from the suburbs and checked out the boats. My office found itself dispersed on the promenade every twenty minutes for three days- watching the Blue Angels practice or waving to the ships that arrived.
Baltimore, the harbor was alive; that was magic, and you didn’t even have to close any roads. But the willingness you have to change our patterns of movement – think what this could do. We could close Pratt Street during summer weekends to mimic New York’s Summer Streets program- opening up the Harbor loop to cyclists and runners instead of restricting them to side lanes. We could get kids into the streets with sidewalk chalk. Install a slip n’ slide on Federal Hill. With all the hype around the Grand Prix and the fact that nobody likes it, imagine what it could be if you chose an event that people did like. Baltimore, do you realize what your willingness to do to the broken allows you the ability to fix?
[1] I throw a footnote in here because I have no quantitative evidence to support this claim. Rather, the observation indicated by “many” correlates with a three-year audio confirmation of complaints, disinterest, and phrases like I’m participating in the Grand Flee to avoid the Grand Pricks at the Grand Inconvenience.”
Eloquent as always, Lindsey. I’m dubious, though, about an event that seems to be more of a source of community dread than pride. And I’m not convinced that engineering a convincing tourist trap is either an imaginative or sustainable route to urban progress, even if it does bring in the punters. If anything, the grand prix seems to be a glaring symbol of misplaced priorities and doltish institutional thinking that sees spectacle and fanfare as the way to bring about some kind of renaissance – bread and circuses, only the actual people of Baltimore generally gag and leave. There’s something intellectually impoverished to me about trying to rebuild a city by desperately trying to bring in tourists for temporary injections of cash (the benefits, profit-margin and distribution of which are highly questionable), rather than endeavoring to cultivate the assets we already have. To me, that’s a sign of a desperate post-industrial ruin sinking into the mire, not a strong, confident municipality with visionary leadership.
I have a pool going on at the office: who can guess the closest to the contrived number of millions of dollars that SRB will claim to be “economic benefit” from this weekend on the news this week. It took two consecutive years of financial drubbing for the businesses (read: bars and restaurants) surrounding this folly to come up with a way of maybe not losing their ass over the weekend. Grand Prix Fixe menus. With a tip of the camo Oriole hat to Dave Barry, I am not making that up. The hotels aren’t full, Fells Point sees a school-night crowd at best, and like Lindsey learned, everyone else just leaves town. People are NOT streaming into the city from parts unknown to spectate this boondoggle. But as taxpayers, we should be concerned with the amount of public money given up to support it. And full disclosure, I work for one of the agencies forced to spend some extra taxpayer dollars to do just that, and that’s at the state level, so understand it’s not just city residents getting handed that bill.
I struggle with my opinions on the Grand Prix because I am part of the silent minority that loves being able to bike down from my house and watch an IndyCar series race. I was jumping for joy when I got to see Will Power and Matt Dixon race around the Inner Harbor. I would personally rather have a Grand Prix in my city than a football team. However, what the Ravens and the Orioles do is build a sense of pride within Baltimore, and to me this is the real failure of the Grand Prix. Going to the Indianapolis 500 is a sacred tradition in our family and that’s mainly because the 500 is a part of the ethos of Indianapolis. The event is a great example of the sense of place that’s lacking from the Baltimore Grand Prix. Every race starts with the Indiana state song, notable locals have place of honor in cars that parade around the track before the race, the day before the riders parade around the city. The Indianapolis 500 is part of the city, whereas the Baltimore Grand Prix is an insurgent. To Lindsey’s point there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to engage the general public of Baltimore to become fans or take part in any way. The entire event is confined for ticket holders with blue tarp preventing members of the public from even glancing to see what the race is like. The race itself contains no homage to the city that holds it except for a few shots of the inner harbor on televised coverage. It isn’t defined by Baltimore and it doesn’t even seem to care if we take part. I think any economic endeavor that looks outward for support without the least attempt of involving the residents of a city is a failure, no matter how much money it does or doesn’t bring in, no matter how much I love watching IndyCar drivers race around my beloved home.
Dean- Thank you for your insight. Greatly appreciated. Youv’e definitely got a perspective and involvement many of us don’t have.
Hasdai – I challenge your sentence: “trying to rebuild a city by desperately trying to bring in tourists for temporary injections of cash, rather than endeavoring to cultivate the assets we already have.” My hunch is that sometimes things are so undeniably broken, that the easiest thing to do is try something new, or direct attention elsewhere. It’s a distraction approach when the band-aid is already falling off.
Maybe the wrong approach, but you can’t accuse someone for not being visionary if they ignore everything that exists and try to create something new. Is the vision off? Well, possibly, sure. Misprioritized? Perhaps. Though if people see it in a triage frame, and all the assets are lying at the bottom of the lake, I’ll give people props for building a new boat. The next step, of course, is realizing that the boat is sinking.
Okay, new column/social media challenge: what’s your favorite metaphor for Baltimore’s decline! (Alright, alright, we can do renaissance too, which btw, is itself kind of a metaphor.)