The CEO of the Baltimore Development Corp. picked yesterday, a government holiday, to spare his City Hall superiors the embarrassment of facing the failure of another high-profile project.

In a four-sentence statement emailed Monday to the media, Colin Tarbert announced that the latest team of developers of Superblock had failed to secure financing to restore a lonely stretch of city-owned buildings west of Charles Center.

The BDC is terminating a land disposition agreement made five years ago with Westside Partners, who proposed a lavish apartment-hotel-grocery store redo of the onetime heart of Baltimore’s downtown shopping district.

“Given the time elapsed since the project was awarded and the two extensions already granted, BDC believes that reissuing a Request for Proposals is in the city’s best interest,” Tarbert said, adding that a new RFP is expected to be issued next year.

The latest twist to the Superblock saga was not unexpected given that one of the partners’ companies declared bankruptcy in June, another partner dropped out in 2022, and the other two have a slim record of completed projects.

Much better capitalized developers, from New York and Atlanta, earlier proved unable to develop the property after signing onto the project in 2006 with Mayor Martin O’Malley.

Now 18 years and five mayors later, the promise of a “transformational plan” to lift up the Westside has ended up a ghost town of graffiti-scrawled buildings that once housed small shopkeepers who catered primarily to lower-income city residents.

Arrested Development

The return to square one at Superblock comes within a context of arrested development in other parts of the city.

The list includes the long-stalled rebuilding of 14 acres of Poppleton on the Westside, the teardown of the Hendler Creamery in Old Town, and the decidedly mixed results of the $1 billion East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) renewal project around the Johns Hopkins Medical Campus.

Even the city’s successes at Harbor East, Harbor Point and, perhaps, Kevin Plank’s Baltimore Peninsula (the jury is still out) have come at a price – first, through several hundred million dollars of tax incentives and abatements and now in the economic decline of Baltimore’s downtown.

Superblock has ended up a ghost town in the heart of Baltimore’s onetime shopping core.

Even after the McKeldin Fountain was razed at the reported behest of its then CEO, T. Rowe Price is leaving its longtime headquarters at Light and Pratt streets for new digs at Harbor Point. Downtown is grappling with a 30% commercial vacancy rate, The Baltimore Business Journal recently reported, perhaps the highest since the Great Depression.

All of which puts in sharp relief the latest “game changer” championed by Mayor Brandon Scott.

He seeks voter approval in the November 5 general election of a charter amendment allowing a private apartment complex to be built at Harborplace and the adjoining Inner Harbor Park.

Past as Prologue

As was the case with Superblock, critics have called on city leaders to resist the overblown visions of developers by encouraging organic development and the re-use of existing buildings.

Superblock’s array of historic structures still stand for the most part (the razing of the Art Deco-inspired Greyhound bus terminal being a notable exception).

But the district north of the CFG Bank Arena, including Superblock and the Howard Street corridor, has deteriorated badly under City Hall stewardship and serves as a symbol of the unequal outcomes of neighborhoods based on income and race.

The low-slung, green-roofed Harborplace pavilions could be repurposed into the same crowd-pleasing “festival marketplace” they were in the 1980s and 90s, according to distinguished architects and the former president of the BDC, M. Jay Brodie.

The Scott administration, however, wants to spend vastly more on Harborplace than on Superblock.

“Question F” on next month’s ballot opens the door to 900-1,000 apartment units at the waterfront park – plus a futuristic shopping and commercial emporium – based on little more than a vision by its chief promoter, MCB Real Estate’s P. David Bramble.

Bramble says rebuilding the waterfront promenade and re-configuring the street grid around Light, Pratt and Calvert streets will require $400 million or more from taxpayers to match a roughly equal amount of private capital.

Like the now-discarded Superblock team, MCB was handed the keys to Harborplace with little transparency and no independent analysis of the public cost of reinventing the Inner Harbor to the developer’s liking.

Such matters will happen after voters approve Question F, Bramble says.

So far, Scott’s transportation department has not looked at how traffic will be re-routed on very busy downtown streets.

Nor have there been engineering studies regarding the siting of a 30-story-plus apartment tower (height restrictions being lifted to accommodate Bramble by the City Council) a few score feet from harbor waters.

These steps, too, are being deferred to some future date and – if past is prologue – will likely contain some unpleasant surprises.