The paid canvasser’s enthusiastic pitch to walk-ins at an early voting center – “Vote ‘yes’ on Question F! It’s to improve the Inner Harbor!” – was generally all that was needed.

Most responded with an “Oh, yeah? Okay. Sounds good. Thanks, I will.”

But John Balicki knew about the proposal to open up Baltimore’s waterfront to private residential development and didn’t like it.

“That plan with apartments that’s going to destroy the Inner Harbor? That monstrosity that’s going to block the view of the water?” Balicki said to Bella Williams, stationed in front of an Enoch Pratt Library branch in Highlandtown.

Williams fired back with several of the bullet points on the “Yes on Question F” fliers she’d been handing out for hours.

“What if I were to tell you, $200 million in climate change resiliency measures?’”

“What if I were to say, one of the biggest outdoor amphitheaters in the city?”

“How about 500 new trees and new urban wetlands?”

Actually, none of the improvements she touted have been funded, and none are triggered by a “yes” vote on Question F, which is on the general election ballot for Baltimore city voters.

New trees, wetlands and a big amphitheater could be built at the Inner Harbor without Question F passing. Or never happen at all, even if the measure was approved.

What wasn’t explained was what Question F does change:

A nearly 50-year-old City Charter provision that sets aside the city-owned waterfront along Light and Pratt  streets as “Inner Harbor Park,” allowing for only restaurants and retail on part of the site, hence the two Harborplace pavilions opened in 1980.

If Question F is approved on Tuesday, “multi-family residential development and off-street parking” (i.e., a parking garage) would also be allowed there. It would also expand by 40% – from 3.2 acres to 4.5 acres – the parkland leased by whoever owns Harborplace.

That owner is MCB Real Estate.

Headed by P. David Bramble and Peter Pinkard, the company would be able to demolish the low-rise Harborplace pavilions and replace them with twin apartment towers as well as a mid-sized office building and a sprawling, sail-shaped restaurant/retail structure.

The price for doing that, at a cost of about $400 million in private capital, is that Bramble and Pinkard also want between $400 million and $500 million in public funds to change the physical layout of the area.

They want to shrink Light Street, eliminate the roadway’s spur to Calvert Street, and raise and rebuild the waterfront promenade to counteract expected rising water levels due to global warming.

Williams’ pitch – part of MCB’s $240,000 pro-Question F blitz – was all about the amphitheater and a “greener Inner Harbor.”

She didn’t bring up the apartment buildings with no height limits, thanks to an earlier zoning change by the Baltimore City Council.

Those tall towers were the sticking point for Balicki.

“I’m not sold on it. The designs look alright, but I just don’t like it for that area” he told The Brew.

“Look at Harborplace now. It has a kind of nice low impact on the view of the water,” he continued. “Do you really want to be looking at big buildings there?”

Money and Momentum

The sidewalk interaction earlier this week was a snapshot of the heated debate over one of the two most contested local issues on the ballot ahead of election day on November 5.

Question H, which would shrink the size of the City Council from 14 to 8, has also generated pushback.

Since early voting began last week, Question F and Question H canvassers have often found themselves working nearby each other.

Question H is funded almost entirely by David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, with a history of supporting Donald Trump and conservative causes.

Smith argues that halving the size of Baltimore’s legislative body would make it more efficient.

Anti-Question H forces, composed of labor unions, City Council members and grassroots groups, are waging a “Stop Sinclair” campaign, arguing that cutting back the council would make city government less accessible to the average citizen and open the door to influence-peddling by Smith and other business owners with deep pockets.

(Smith’s company owns 150 broadcast stations across the country, including the local FOX45 and he himself is the majority owner of the Baltimore Sun, where full-page pro-Question H ads have been running for days.)

If voters reject either of these ballot questions, it would defy a political law of gravity in Baltimore: voters reflexively approve ballot measures. Only one of the hundreds of questions put on the ballot since the 1990s has gone down in defeat.

If Question F were defeated next week, it would qualify as a political miracle given the forces allied with Bramble.

Not only would defeat of Question F upend historical precedent, it would qualify as a minor political miracle given the forces allied with Bramble.

Beaming out on the “Yes on F” flyer is the face of Governor Wes Moore, accompanied by his grand endorsement: “This is about ensuring our state’s largest city claims its rightful place in the American story.”

Likewise, 13 of the Council’s 15 members, except Ryan Dorsey (Antonio Glover was absent), approved three bills that paved the way for Bramble’s plan after it sped through the process last winter.

Many of the same council members appear in social media videos and on the Baltimore for Question F website endorsing a “new” Harborplace.

The Brew has traced over $30,000 in campaign contributions to Mayor Brandon Scott from Bramble, Pinkard and MCB-affiliated entities.

Comptroller Bill Henry, who voted to give Bramble exclusive rights to the Harborplace lease as a member of the Board of Estimates, picked up $9,000 from Bramble interests in the last election cycle, while City Council President Nick Mosby secured at least $7,000.

After beating Mosby in the Democratic Party primary, becoming the heir apparent as City Council president, Zeke Cohen was recently the recipient of a $6,000 donation from MCB Property Services.

Mismanagement and Misogyny

In the final weeks before the election, both sides have been making their closing arguments. The grassroots “Vote F-No!” forces, having failed in the courts, are now hoping for a David v. Goliath victory at the voting booth.

Their most recent gambit was a press conference featuring former tenants of the Can Co., a shopping center in Canton that Bramble’s company owned until recently.

MCB Real Estate “is a disgrace,” said former Chesapeake Wine Co. co-owner Phyllis Wert, alleging mismanagement, lack of security and a laundry list of broken promises.

“They said they were going to paint the building. They were going to put a water feature out front. It would be all small businesses. I mean, it was [going to be] really gorgeous, new light fixtures, all uniform seating, new signage for all the businesses,” Wert said on Monday.

“Instead, the first thing they did was they took out all the trees,” she continued.

In place of the promised nautical blue-and-white, the buildings were painted a battleship gray because “they said it was on sale.” And instead of locally owned businesses, chain stores like the Original Pancake House and a uBreakiFix were brought in.

After a homicide and an armed robbery in the shopping center, they asked for working security cameras and other measures, but were treated, the women said, with condescending “misogynistic” replies, none of them in writing.

“They talked down to you,” Wert said, as co-owner Kim Banks and a small group of people in green “Vote F No!” tee shirts, including attorney Thiru Vignarajah, stood with her.

“Email after email. Nothing. And that’s just the way it ended. They never did anything for us,” she declared. “I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen to the Inner Harbor,” she added, urging voters to reject Question F.

Question F’s critics also point to MCB’s steep financial losses on its Can Co. investment, asking why Mayor Scott is now handing the firm wide latitude to demolish, rebuild and manage Baltimore’s waterfront crown jewel.

Three months ago, MCB sold the Can Co. for $12 million, a huge drop from the $42.9 million that MCB and other investors spent to acquire the property in 2017.

MCB did not respond to a request from The Brew for comment.

Rx for an “Existential Crisis”?

Over the last year, Bramble, a genial businessman raised in West Baltimore, has maintained a low-key presence. But as opposition to his plans grew louder, he’s gone on the offensive.

Speaking recently on the T.J. Smith Show on WBAL radio, he said that downtown Baltimore is “facing an existential crisis” – and his firm came to realize they were the only ones with the will and wherewithal to end it.

“MCB needs this deal like we needed a hole in the head,” Bramble declared. “It’s really important to dispel this myth that we were hand-picked for this.”

Those who object to a redevelopment that includes apartment units are being “silly,” he said. That’s just how it’s done these days: “Everywhere you go, it’s apartments and retail.”

• Promising a greener Harborplace, while soft-pedaling those high-rise towers (10/9/24)

• MCB funnels $240,000 to the ballot committee backing Question F (10/26/24)

Over the last month, an MCB-financed ballot committee, “Baltimore for a New Harborplace,” has been doing most of the work to promote Question F.

The group has directed leafletting at early voting centers, flooded social media and plastered public places with signs, including at the Harborplace pavilions and around The Rotunda complex in North Baltimore, which MCB owns.

Last weekend, its canvassers were seen placing the leaflets in Federal Hill mailboxes.

Black Voices

The Inner Harbor Coalition, an all volunteer group of opponents, collected donations for a website and some signs of their own and has been staffing the early voting sites.

For months, they’ve been making an effort to dispel what they see as myths about the project, with dialogue that plays out on the 1,200-member Facebook page, the Harborplace Forum.

With Mayor Scott charging that critics are objecting to the project because it’s being undertaken by a Black developer, Forum moderators have pointed to prominent local Black voices raising questions about Bramble’s plan.

“We don’t always have to go bigger,” WEAA talk show host, Dr. Karsonya “Kaye” Wise Whitehead, said in a video posted earlier this month.

She critiqued the plan after hearing objections to it on her show by noted Black architect Leon Bridges, predicting that it will be unaffordable for the average Baltimorean.

“They’re getting ready to build these massive huge skyscrapers to the sky. Who is living there? I couldn’t even live there,” Whitehead said. “It’s going to be the ones drinking the organic oat milk and walking around in yoga pants while the rest of us are going to work.”

And unlike others sources that have dismissed the widely-held negative views of the project held by local architects, Whitehead gave respect to those of the 92-year-old Bridges.

“I would like to trust the elders,” she said.

Alternative Plans

Also promoted on the Harborplace Forum page is a presentation by architect and urban designer Chip Place, who disputed the idea that critics of the plan want nothing at all to change at Harborplace.

“Inner Harbor Park isn’t really broken,” he told a recent gathering focused on alternative visions for the city’s tourist waterfront that do not hinge on new apartments or condominiums.

Place pointed to models from other cities, like Chicago’s Millennium Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Norfolk’s Waterside, and earlier local plans to revive Baltimore’s waterfront, such as Inner Harbor 2.0. He showed photos of events like Fleet Week and the Christmas Village that still draw throngs to the Inner Harbor.

Instead of relying on MCB’s plan that “crams lots of leaseable square feet in such a prime space,” he argued that “the city and state should pay for its own Inner Harbor Park plan.”

Ideas like that on the Harborplace Forum do not go without pushback. Former Zoning Board Chairman Geoffrey Washington hopped on to pooh-pooh one writer who supported apartments downtown but thought they should not be erected right at the water’s edge.

“Trade the West Pavilion for a permanent beer garden that could be added to the Christmas Village and other such festivals, while giving the north one a major facelift,” the man suggested.

“Given that a purely retail mall concept existed there and failed, as strip malls have across the U.S.,” Washington shot back, “there’s really no reason to believe that idea would be any different.”

His pushback got a response from Teporah Bilezikian, who said her former store at Harborplace and many others were successful until Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., the owner before MCB, “screwed it up.”

The original pavilions “provided a lively, fast-paced retail environment with thousands and thousands of customers coming to my store every week,” she said.

“The Rouse company provided a space for local Baltimore artisans, and they provided constant attractions and activities to keep visitors coming to the area.”

Faux Harbor East

Even filmmaker John Waters’ opinion on the plan found its way into the dialogue.

Spoiler alert: the Pope of Trash doesn’t like it.

“I liked when the Inner Harbor was scary the first time,” Waters said in a statement to Baltimore Fishbowl.

“Before Harbor Place. Before gentrification. Sailors. Lesbian bars. The Block. Then it went good upscale. Now it’s scary boring.”

“But the scariest of all,” he continued, “would be if it went faux Harbor East for rich wanna-be types without any edge, a closet Annapolis when we already have a good one.”

– Mark Reutter contributed to this story.

– To reach a reporter editors@baltimorebrew.com

Resources:

Past Brew Coverage The Future of Baltimore’s Harborplace

Harborplace Forum (Facebook page)

Inner Harbor Coalition

Baltimore for Question F

Our Harborplace

Harborplace redevelopment fans (Facebook page)