Tag

Tourism

Grand Possibilities

By | The Good Plan | 5 Comments

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.”

 

IMAGE CREDIT. Wikimedia Commons.

Waterfront (mis)Management

By | Design, Social Enterprise, The Good Plan | No Comments

In the planning world, water is an asset. A public fountain or interactive water feature comes with a frequently-kept promise of bare feet, pennies, and photographs. Formal or informal, the joy on the faces of those playing in a spouting fire hydrant is the same as those playing in a municipally-owned fountain. Even without the barefoot interaction, waterfront property is of the highest value along the coast. Those of us in coastal towns like our water. We like our seafood, we like our ocean, and I’m sure we like our mountains too – but not enough to move to Montana.

Baltimore is undeniably fortunate to have the potential for significant waterfront engagement. The waterfront promenade, snaking seven miles along the Inner Harbor, is a valiant attempt to further the relationship between the city resident and the water, but each town has its challenges, and when it comes to waterfront property Baltimore is no exception.

Cities can’t just put a pathway around a waterfront and call it an asset – there’s more to it than that. I rarely frequent the Inner Harbor. If and when I do, I park in Little Italy and cross President Street on foot, en route to H&M or Urban Outfitters. I’ll park on the east side of I-83 for a concert in Rams Head or a basketball game at Lucky’s. The Inner Harbor is not my neighborhood, but then again, is it anyone’s?

This past weekend I joined three colleagues for a walk around the promenade. Photographing light fixtures, seating, noting the scale of public art and the absence of benches in places we wanted to sit, we took our cameras and notebooks and walked – noting what worked, what didn’t, and what was somewhat nonsensical.

“Wait, there are two significant service entrances for two neighboring restaurants?”

“Hold on, delivery trucks turn around here? Where the bridge dumps pedestrians directly onto the promenade?”

“Why doesn’t anyone walk back here? Why does this feel like a service entrance?”

During our walk, a colleague noted that areas in the harbor are always busy.

“People are always climbing on these,” he noted, while pointing to the upside down kid-scale arches outside the information pavilion.

‘Yes,’ I responded ‘but they’re never the same people.’

At present, the Inner Harbor is for tourists; the people crawling on this upturned artwork will do so once or twice before jumping on a bus or plane, preserving the novelty of our harbor place in their temporary visitor minds. So how can we change this? How can we make an area crafted for tourists more frequented by residents, and can there be that type of overlap?

Here’s how not to do it: Puerto Madero is an upscale waterfront area in Buenos Aires that caters to residents of a higher economic divide. The neighborhood lies on the outskirts of the city, and it is no accident the neighborhood remains disconnected from the city’s public transit network. Yes, there are restaurants and apartments, but you have to pay to get there, and you have to pay to stay there. While it is certainly public land, the definition of ‘public’ is “upper class individuals.”

Imagine if Baltimore were like that: you could only get to the waterfront via taxi or personal car. Upon arrival you wouldn’t find anything to do but eat or drink in an overpriced outdoor restaurant. There are no tourist attractions or museums, no sand volleyball courts, no connected running path. What results is a beautiful waterfront space, intentionally designed to serve the elite, and not considered a formal part of the city – it may as well be considered a nearby waterfront suburb.

Choice American cities like Boston, Seattle, and New York have found their waterfronts hidden by highways and traffic, restricting the waterfront experience to dashboard and window views while speeding from place to place or sitting in traffic between. In this sense, Baltimore is fortunate; having preserved the waterfront path for foot traffic and bicycles, and allowing access to the area by way of public transit and private car. The so-called infrastructure of a waterfront is present. What lacks are the soft costs and identity. Putting in smart seating, effective lighting, and trashcans must be partnered with a change in mentality. At some point, we need to adopt the harbor as a place for us, the resident, and not simply the place to take our out-of -towner.