CHAPTER 8

“A Tourist Town at the Expense of the Poor”: The Making of Two Baltimores

On a warm, sunny day in July 1981, Baltimore’s mayor, outfitted in a yellow-and-red-striped Victorian bathing suit and sporting a straw hat, stood on the edge of a seal tank beside his city’s newly built national aquarium. The mayor had already dropped rubber duckies into the water and was preparing to follow them in. He descended a set of underwater stairs until all that remained for the few hundred reporters and spectators to see was his hat floating on the water. After he resurfaced, the mayor swam to some rocks, making way for the tank’s rightful inhabitants. Released by their attendants, a group of seals slowly scooted down a runway to join the mayor in their new home. As the seals swam around “Hizhonor,” the audience could not help being charmed by Charm City’s quirky mayor. And as they looked up from the spectacle to glance around the inner harbor that the aquarium bordered, few could fail to be impressed by recent dramatic changes. Looking southwest across the tip of the harbor, reporters sent by local, national, and even international news outlets could see the Maryland Science Center, built some five years earlier to attract visitors to the waterfront. Spectators looking to the west of the seal tank and past a new high-rise World Trade Center glimpsed the mast of the city’s historic all-sail Civil War navy ship docked at a new marina. Next to the ship and just north of the Science Center, the two glass pavilions of Baltimore’s Harborplace mall, designed by nationally renowned developer James Rouse, hugged the harbor’s edge. Attached to one of the pavilions by a pedestrian walkway was the recently opened Hyatt Regency hotel. And just beyond the hotel was a new convention center, which city officials hoped would attract increased business now that the mayor’s swim with the seals was going to put Baltimore on the map.¹

Baltimore’s waterfront had changed considerably during the less than ten years that Mayor William Donald Schaefer had been in office. And Schaefer had presided over the harbor’s facelift with enthusiasm. He and his staff labored with the same degree of dedication and passion that had fueled the city’s antipoverty and human-services workers in their efforts to combat economic insecurity during the 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, the mayor and his advisers understood the waterfront projects as a type of antipoverty initiative. By attracting tourists and businesses to Baltimore, the mayor hoped to jumpstart the economy of his deindustrializing city and generate revenue that would reverse decline and eventually trickle down to low-income residents. The strategy was one also pursued by other executives in rust-belt cities. Schaefer proved particularly masterful at the approach for two main reasons. First, like the antipoverty warriors, he was adept at securing federal grants to pursue his projects—for like Baltimore’s War on Poverty, much of the city’s commercial redevelopment was paid for with federal dollars. And second, but this time unlike the city’s antipoverty warriors, who had worked hard to bring city residents into the political process, Schaefer deliberately limited the number of people who participated in redevelopment-related decision-making in order to accommodate the expectations of the business community. By so doing, he may have cinched deals the city otherwise would have lost. He also, however, denied city residents a role in determining how their city responded to deindustrialization and globalization and largely excluded African Americans from opportunities to share in the entrepreneurial opportunities that redevelopment opened.

Jimmy Carter’s UDAGs subsidized much of Baltimore’s redevelopment. The Democratic president was far less generous when it came to funding social welfare measures, however. As a result, the city’s predominantly African American and female antipoverty and human-services workers found their resources, efficacy, and influence in municipal affairs further eroded—as the flow of federal funding for anticrime measures continued to increase the presence of law enforcement in low-income neighborhoods. During much of the 1960s and early 1970s, activist public-service providers had played important roles in battles over how the city should respond to poverty and other urban problems. President Richard Nixon’s New Federalism and then Carter’s UDAGs shifted power and federal resources into the hands of predominantly white and male elected officials. Local decision-making still mattered and could have countered the shift to the right on the national level, but Schaefer’s notorious “Father-Knows-Best” approach to governance, fierce commitment to austerity, enthusiasm for commercial redevelopment, and inattention to African Americans’ aspirations helped to forge the deep race- and class-based divides that grew to characterize postindustrial Baltimore.

Meanwhile, public service providers and recipients and the leaders of government unions continued to call attention to the human costs of the mayor’s agenda and the president’s conservative macroeconomic policies. Increasingly, however, they found themselves scapegoated for the nation’s economic woes by conservative politicians, angry taxpayers, and a growing number of Democrats. In Baltimore, welfare workers continued to come under the fiercest scrutiny, and officials subjected their department to repeated inquiries and investigations. As in other struggling cities, African American women were overrepresented among both welfare workers and recipients. In a political context in which conservatives intent on discrediting redistributive responses to poverty and rolling back civil rights legislation continued to press dog-whistle claims that associated urban African Americans with criminality both on the street and in welfare offices, indictments of Black welfare-service providers, government employees more generally, and public-sector unions reinforced the claims. Meanwhile, cuts to public services compelled women in their roles as family caretakers to attempt to compensate with their own labor. Leaders of AFSCME defended both their members and the essential services they provided, but they faced a powerful foe as the New Right launched an aggressive assault on the regulatory state, the workers who staffed it, and collective bargaining in the public sector.

“Tourism? It Was Like Working for a Crazy Person”: The Baltimore Renaissance

While Carter’s macroeconomic and domestic policies did not bode well for the city’s poor residents and job seekers, the president’s public-private programs were greeted with considerable fanfare in the mayor’s office. City officials had long partnered with members of the business community on urban planning, and Schaefer was an enthusiast of the downtown revitalization efforts jointly undertaken by the Greater Baltimore Committee and the city. In fact, Schaefer ultimately proved even more ambitious than many of his corporate collaborators when it came to downtown development. While many of his revitalization plans targeted keeping factories in or attracting them to the city, Schaefer also appreciated the folly of trying to rebuild Baltimore using blueprints from its industrial heyday. The city needed to forge its postindustrial future. During the early 1960s, city voters had approved bonds to support the revitalization of 240 acres around the city’s inner harbor. The long-term plans for the waterfront included commercial, residential, and recreational development. By the end of the 1960s, the project was under way, but investor confidence failed to materialize. Few private firms stepped up to gamble on Baltimore’s port, scared off perhaps by the dead fish that floated on the scummy surface of the harbor or the colonies of rats that made the city’s waterfront their home. And that is when Schaefer had become mayor. Perennially optimistic about Baltimore’s future, the mayor imagined possibilities for the harbor beyond those proposed by the Greater Baltimore Committee. “Tourism?” one city employee remembers thinking incredulously when the mayor touted the idea at a civic breakfast. “It was like working for a crazy person.”²

Schaefer’s ideas may have seemed outlandish to city natives who could hardly imagine rusting Baltimore as a destination point for out-of-towners, but they mayor knew he had to innovate. As federal interest in cities plummeted during the 1970s, urban executives realized that they were being left to fend for themselves in a global economy characterized by destabilizing capital mobility and competitive credit markets. The changes led to a shift in the responsibilities of local executives. As scholar David Harvey explains, rather than simply being managers of cities, mayors began to assume the role of entrepreneur.³ Business interests with a stake in the commercial viability of city centers often encouraged the change and the opportunity to make city governments more attentive to their needs. In Baltimore, Schaefer enthusiastically embraced the role of entrepreneur, convinced that trickle-down remedies were an important solution to his city’s problems. Tourism was a cornerstone of his entrepreneurial agenda.⁴

As Schaefer embarked on his campaign to transform Baltimore’s waterfront into a tourist attraction, he garnered a young and enthusiastic group of staffers committed to his agenda. So dedicated were some that they were eventually dubbed the “Kool-Aid drinkers,” a reference to the devotees of cult figure Jim Jones who committed group suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.⁵ The mayor’s financial officers also stood ready to help. In addition, the mayor also had an influential ally in Baltimore native Robert Embry, the assistant secretary of HUD, who had previously coordinated Baltimore’s commercial revitalization projects. Baltimore was well-served by having an advocate with influence over the distribution of UDAGs. Although some national observers complained that Embry favored his hometown, his supporters joked that he was actually quite fair; he doled out UDAGs fifty-fifty—half for Baltimore and half for the nation’s other cities.⁶

Carter’s public-private partnership grants enabled Baltimore officials to realize many redevelopment projects. By 1981, the city had received $37 million in UDAGs and $50 million from the Economic Development Administration. Some of the federal funding did support development projects in neighborhoods. The city also used the aid to support industrial interests. General Motors, which was one of the few remaining large manufacturing employers in the city, had little trouble convincing officials that what was good for GM was good for Baltimore. A $9 million UDAG enabled the corporation to expand its local production facilities. Most noteworthy, however, city and business leaders used considerable federal funds to reinvigorate the Greater Baltimore Committee harbor renewal plan and move it in the direction of tourism. A $10 million UDAG helped the city secure a glitzy waterfront Hyatt Regency hotel, which became a magnet for the harbor redevelopment that followed. In addition, $1.5 million from the Economic Development Administration helped cover the costs of the aquarium. Federal as well as state revenue also helped subsidize the convention center, the dock for the city’s historic navy warship, the science center, shoreline landscaping, and a marina. The combination of intergovernmental revenue and Schaefer’s boosterism created what would soon provoke marvel as the Baltimore renaissance.⁷

Flush with various forms of development funds earmarked for public-private ventures, Schaefer sought an efficient method of distributing the revenue and overseeing the city’s development projects. He was reluctant, however, to relinquish to the democratic process authority over the delicate and sometimes time-sensitive business of deal-making. Schaefer believed that if the city was going to achieve its downtown metamorphosis, municipal representatives were going to have to move with the rapid rhythms of the business world rather than the plodding tempo compelled by city politics. Referenda took time and required city administrators to defend priorities citizens might not share. And city council debate could produce contract riders requiring developers to hire union workers or minority contractors—requirements that might squelch a deal with a firm that could quite easily turn to another more accommodating downtrodden city. With those concerns in mind, Schaefer adopted the antithesis of the decision-making mechanism War on Poverty advocates had embraced. Whereas they had endeavored to bring people into the political process, Schaefer pursued minimal feasible community participation. He created a network of quasi-public corporations to handle deal-making and project management. Because they were public, the corporations had the legal authority to exercise eminent domain to amass land and distribute public resources. Because the corporations were also private, however, they could avoid federal regulations that mandated public disclosure, competitive bidding, and affirmative action.⁸

By the early 1980s, Schaefer had created between thirty and forty quasi-public corporations, such as the Baltimore Development Corporation and Charles Center–Inner Harbor Management, Inc. The most controversial of the corporations was the Baltimore City Trustees Loan and Guarantee Program, which served as the city’s development bank. The mayor appointed two trustees to run the outfit. One was Charles Benton, the city’s finance director. During the 1960s, Benton had been relentlessly suspicious of the ways African Americans who ran the city’s antipoverty agencies disbursed federal funds. He frequently charged mismanagement and called for audits. Ironically, considering his espoused devotion to probity, Benton demonstrated considerable flexibility in the way he managed federal funds for redevelopment. As journalist C. Fraser Smith explains, “If he finagled the books, taking money that had been voted for one purpose and washing it bureaucratically for use in another project, or engaging in minor league arbitraging, investing federal government money and taking the interest for local uses, a prohibited practice, he knew how to retrace his steps or how to have those steps blessed by Schaefer and the Board of Estimates.”⁹ Benton and a second trustee, Frank Baker of the Monumental Life Company, worked almost entirely free from public scrutiny, creatively packaging public funds, including UDAGs and CDBGs, to firms willing to invest in the city if offered adequate incentives. Between 1976, when the bank opened, and 1986, when Schaefer shut it down to avoid uncomfortable questions during his bid for the governorship of Maryland, the city trustees brokered $500 million in development deals, some of which were risky enough that traditional bankers would have balked. Some, although certainly not all, of the development funds went into Baltimore’s new postindustrial skyline and harbor redevelopment. And while many of the projects met with success, others flopped. According to calculations by Joan Jacobson, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, by 1992 the city had either written off or did not expect repayment on fifty loans with a total value of about $60 million.¹⁰

Most people in the city knew nothing of Baltimore’s trustees and quasi-public corporations until 1980 when a series of exposé articles in the Baltimore Sun by Smith introduced residents to their “shadow government.” Many responded with outrage at what they saw as a subversion of democracy. AfroAmerican columnist and city activist Madeline Murphy protested the mayor’s willingness to “pander to business interests at the expense of basic programs” and complained of “corporations cynically developed to circumvent the will of the people.”¹¹ Resident L. H. Kohlman wondered how Baltimore could find funds for hotel developers but not for textbooks for students in the city’s public schools. The editors of the Baltimore Sun protested as well. “Ours is supposed to be a government of checks and balances. But in the part of the government run by trustees as a private corporation that seems to mean only blank checks and bank balances,” they complained.¹² Others expressed alarm that the city council was being circumvented and wondered if the City Charter could accommodate such questionable practices. (It did, a judge later determined.)¹³ Meanwhile, Frances Froelicher, the founder of Baltimore’s Citizens Planning and Housing Association who had known Schaefer for years, attributed the mayor’s use of the secretive corporations to conceit. She surmised that the mayor “feels he doesn’t want to be bothered with citizens’ committees because he has listened to all that in the past. He is in power right now and he wants to accomplish what he has wanted to accomplish all these years.”¹⁴

Members of the city council also expressed shock at the revelation that they had been largely excluded from economic planning in their city. For quite some time, the council had not been much of a match for Schaefer. The mayor had multiple acolytes in the eighteen-member body, and only a few others occasionally dared to seriously challenge him. Meanwhile, during the late 1970s, the body suffered from weak leadership, which Schaefer easily exploited. From 1971 to 1982, the council’s president was Walter Orlinsky. Although Schaefer and Orlinsky had once been running mates, by the late 1970s they rarely agreed. In fact, as a Sun reporter explained in 1978, the mayor and the city council president “quite thoroughly detest[ed] one another, [did] not speak to one another, and bad mouth[ed] one another at every opportunity.”¹⁵ Meanwhile, Orlinsky often exercised ineffective control during council meetings, which sometimes deteriorated into chaos.¹⁶

Schaefer did have one particularly outspoken critic on the city council. In 1979, Kweisi Mfume won a seat representing the city’s majority African American Fourth District. Unlike many of the city’s other Black elected officials, Mfume, born Frizzell Gray in 1948, had a working-class rather than a middle-class background. Following the death of his mother, he dropped out of high school and eventually spent more time on street corners than he later viewed prudent. A chance encounter with Parren Mitchell helped lead Mfume to take his life more seriously. He returned to school and became increasingly politically active. African American Vietnam War veterans, his fellow members of the Black Student Union at the Community College of Baltimore County, “the Pan-Africanists, the Panthers, and the Black Muslims” helped to shape his political perspectives, he recalls.¹⁷ His anger about the status of African Americans in the United States intensified. “We were a people chronically and institutionally disenfranchised, feeding off the scraps of the educational system, the job market, and any other channels leading to a life of dignity,” he remembers realizing.¹⁸ As a result, he worried, “heroin, illiteracy, and low self-esteem had a choke hold on the ghetto. While some were making it out, others were trapped for life.”¹⁹ Ultimately, Mfume completed a bachelor’s degree at Morgan State University and a graduate degree at Johns Hopkins University. And at age thirty, his indignation at the state of urban affairs led him to seek a seat on the city council, which he narrowly won. He remained in the position until 1986, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he rose to become the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. He left Congress in 1996 to assume the presidency of the NAACP, a position he held until 2004.²⁰

In Baltimore in the late 1970s, Mfume used a radio program for which he was the disc jockey to criticize Schaefer’s inattention to Black Baltimore, and he repeated his concerns on the campaign trail. Then as a council member, he made access to public-sector jobs for African Americans and women, the appointment of African Americans to municipal boards and commissions, and open housing his top priorities. But when it came to countering Schaefer in city politics, as Baltimore Sun columnist Mike Bowler opined in a 1980 piece titled “Our Impotent City Council,” Mfume and another newcomer to the council were a breath of fresh air but “too little, too late.”²¹ So successful had Schaefer become at passing the parts of his agenda that he actually submitted to the council that it alarmed even his own supporters. Council member Clarence “Du” Burns, for example, who became the city’s first African American city council president and then mayor when Schaefer moved to the governor’s mansion, complained, “There are no checks and balances whatsoever.… We should not be just a rubber stamp.”²² But clearly even a rubber stamp had not been enough for the mayor, council members realized following the “shadow government” exposé. Many responded in anger, even as their fear of Schaefer’s penchant for seeking retribution largely led them to comment to the media anonymously. “I understand the need for progress … ,” one contended, “[but] it’s that old question of whether it’s better to have a democracy or a benevolent dictator.” Willing to go on the record, council member Mary Pat Clarke concurred. “Democracy is a very messy process, but it works,” she argued.²³

In response to the criticism, Schaefer, known more for boosterism than eloquence, defended his actions as in the best interest of Baltimore. “When you manage a city and you come up with innovative ideas, there’s always the possibility of a higher echelon overcoming the innovative thing you’re trying to do. The trustees are needed in my mind to find innovative ways to do things that you couldn’t do if you didn’t have the flexibility of the trustees,” the mayor explained. The decisions of the trustees did require the approval of the members of the Board of Estimates, he added, referencing a five-member body on which he served alongside two of his appointees. And the proceedings of the Board of Estimates were public records, so nothing was done in total secrecy, he asserted. The trustees were simply needed for the sake of expediting decision-making. “Speed and flexibility are an asset. If you’ve ever tried to get through some government red tape, if you’ve ever tried to get through all the bureaucracy, you can see the need for the ability to move.… That’s one of the reasons why the city of Baltimore is known for its innovative ideas. We move. And the time to move is now, not two or three or four or five years from now,” he argued.²⁴ According to Schaefer, the ends his administration was achieving justified the means; democracy was simply too slow.

The mayor, whose herculean efforts to redevelop the city had attracted national and international attention, was not without defenders both inside and outside of the city. “We should be grateful to Mr. Schaefer,” city resident John Miklos contended, “for having the will and stamina to see the city grow from a deteriorating mess toward a beautiful masterpiece.”²⁵ After all, supporters argued, Schaefer was meeting with success. Much to the amazement of many locals, out-of-towners were starting to get off of Interstate 95 and come to Baltimore—and not just out of desperation for a gas station or restroom. They actually wanted to visit the city. Many in the business community were thrilled with Schaefer’s results regardless of the maneuvering he used. Was anything similar happening in Cleveland or Chicago, real estate developer James A. Ulmer III demanded to know? “In this day of rapid change and increasing competition among cities and regions for a limited supply of jobs and money, it is essential that a municipality be run with as much intelligence, imagination and competitiveness as any private business,” he argued.²⁶ City development officials also defended the quasi-public management system. “I think corporations appreciate being able to work with us because we’re here to smooth the way,” one development official explained to the New York Times in 1984. “It’s not like trying to deal with a government agency. We’re very entrepreneurial. We think government is a business.”²⁷ Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of the shadow government came from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In the early 1980s, the organization studied Baltimore’s trustee system and in a report subtitled “How Your City Can Make Use of Baltimore’s Approach to Creative Financing for Economic Development” recommended the system for emulation.²⁸ Following a decade during which many mayors had been disciplined to prioritize raising credit ratings over solving local problems and felt compelled to negotiate tax abatements to attract employers despite pressing needs for revenue, democratic decision-making apparently seemed expendable as well.

Although many in the city expressed at least a measure of concern about the trustee system, the sentiment did not indicate an overall rejection of Schaefer’s agenda. Even the mayor’s critics knew something had to be done to commercially redevelop the city. When compelled by law to bring a decision concerning revitalization to the voters, such as when he wanted to float a bond, Schaefer typically won the day. Meanwhile, his many supporters thought Schaefer’s ideas were terrific and the mayor himself the best thing that had happened to Baltimore since Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And critics quickly learned the danger of opposing the renaissance. Mfume reports that his constituents paid in public services for his decisions to buck the mayor.²⁹ And a neighborhood group in South Baltimore was denied CDBG funds for two years because members publicly criticized Schaefer’s priorities.³⁰ There were no easy solutions to the complex urban problems the mayor had to tackle. But by subverting the democratic process and punishing critics, Schaefer denied residents the opportunity to explore alternatives and voice concerns.

Despite his multiple efforts to quell dissent, some Schaefer critics did make their views known. Parren Mitchell derisively dubbed the aquarium “the fish tank” and anticipated that the attraction would be a place “where our unemployed city workers can go to look at fish they can’t eat.”³¹ (Of course, that was before the city announced the aquarium’s steep admission prices, which foreclosed attendance even for many locals with full-time jobs.) Welfare rights activists found it unfathomable that the city would even consider building an aquarium given widespread poverty, and leaders of the Baltimore Welfare Rights Organization pledged to picket the proposed waterfront shopping mall.³² The leaders of AFSCME and the Classified Municipal Employees Association, a union that represented about 4,500 of the city’s white-collar workers, also criticized Schaefer’s downtown projects. Sensitive to the critique that its members’ wages were a burden to city taxpayers, AFSCME leaders called attention to the tremendous municipal revenue losses represented by tax abatements extended to encourage harbor revitalization. A 1977 union poster protested Schaefer’s use of corporate welfare by querying the wisdom of granting “$2.5 million in property tax breaks for luxury high-rise apartment operators and three downtown hotels” when the city desperately needed services.³³ Similarly, a columnist in CMEA’s monthly newsletter argued that Schaefer’s attention to downtown projects came at the expense of the poor and complained of “hotels receiving enormous tax breaks [and] funds being shifted from social programs and ‘loaned’ to commercial interests.”³⁴

Public-sector union leaders also expressed concerns about the toll tax abatements and austerity took on the size of the municipal workforce. Government employees composed a significant portion of the city’s working population, and their incomes were vital to the local economy. Yet an article in a 1978 CMEA newsletter complained of “city employees being layed-off [sic] and denied a decent wage” while the city was wheeling and dealing over the harbor’s revitalization.³⁵ Unionized government jobs were more important to the city’s residents than the low-wage service jobs a tourism industry would create, public-sector union critics contended, yet municipal workers were being sacrificed. In addition, many worried that poorly paid service positions in tourism were inadequate replacements for the unionized manufacturing jobs the city was still losing. As Henry Koellein Jr., the president of the Metropolitan Council of the AFL-CIO, argued, “We just can’t make it on fast food and hotels … because you can’t replace 2000 steel workers and 2000 shipyard workers, who are making $8, $10, $12 an hour with 2000 or 4000 fast food, hotel, or restaurant employees, or office employees, who are making minimum wage to $5 an hour, because your tax base is eroding.”³⁶ If new businesses got tax abatements, city residents had low-paying jobs, and the federal government was cutting back on urban aid, how could Baltimore pay for critical public services?

Schaefer’s use of incentives to encourage gentrification in the harbor area and other neighborhoods and his seeming indifference to those moderate-and low-income residents displaced by revitalization further angered activists. During the second half of the 1970s, the largely white, middle-class, back-to-the-city movement produced an unanticipated pool of potential municipal taxpayers. Schaefer wooed some to Baltimore with “homesteading” initiatives, such as houses that could be purchased for a dollar and came with low-interest credit opportunities.³⁷ Meanwhile, although Baltimore did have a program for renovating housing for residents with low incomes, the pace of construction was frustratingly slow. A 1976 housing survey by the U.S. Bureau of the Census had revealed that more than 50 percent of housing occupied by African American renters in the city had structural deficiencies. In 1978, twelve thousand families were on the waiting list for public housing, and seven thousand were on the waiting list for rental assistance.³⁸ Yet the city was subsidizing luxury and middle-class housing. Angry residents joined or formed organizations, such as the Citywide Coalition Against Displacement and Communities Organized to Improve Life, Inc.³⁹ And one particularly frustrated group of twenty-five women joined by activist Ralph Moore staged a sit-in at the Department of Housing and Community Development to protest rodent infestations, shoddy construction, and broken furnaces. As Moore explained to a reporter following the protest, “The ladies can see the need for revitalizing the city and firming up the tax base, but they do not want to see Baltimore become a tourist town at the expense of the poor.”⁴⁰

Meanwhile, when Schaefer’s deal-making did occur in public, African American leaders such as Mitchell sought at least some concessions for Black Baltimore. By the mid-1970s, Mitchell had come to embrace Black wealth creation as the most feasible, if not his preferred, path to African American economic advancement. As he later explained with evident disappointment, “I call economic empowerment the second phase of the civil rights movement because whether we like it or not, that’s what runs this country.”⁴¹ In 1976 while in Congress, Mitchell succeeded in adding an amendment to a public-works program that compelled states and localities seeking federal contracts to set aside 10 percent for minority-owned firms, and he continued to pursue similar ends throughout his career. In Baltimore, Mitchell as well as other Black leaders wanted to make sure that African Americans received a share of the wealth-generating contracts downtown redevelopment entailed. To secure the aquarium venture, political pressure led Schaefer to pledge on the pages of the Afro-American that Black workers would be included during all stages of the projects.⁴² In addition, Mitchell and the influential Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance initially refused to endorse Harborplace, creating pressure that led the city to eventually agreed to mandate set-asides for minority contractors. The concessions were significant but infrequent since so much deal-making happened behind closed doors.⁴³

African American Maryland state legislators, particularly those representing Baltimore, also attempted to use their leverage on behalf of Black city residents. In one instance, they threatened to block bond bills the mayor needed to get through the State House unless he agreed to a 25 percent set-aside for minority contractors and pledged to appoint to municipal boards and commissions an equal number of African Americans and whites. At the time, Black representation on the bodies was only 24 percent, even though African Americans made up more than 50 percent of the population. Although the legislators ultimately backed away from their threat, the mayor did agree to increase set-asides and minority appointments.⁴⁴

African American leaders’ success at winning concessions from the mayor when his initiatives were deliberated publicly indicates that Baltimore’s redevelopment efforts that were negotiated secretively could and probably would have unfolded differently had the mayor used the democratic process. Because of the covert decision-making approach Schaefer adopted, however, Black leaders, as well as the leaders of other interest groups in the city, such as organized labor, women, and welfare recipients, did not have the opportunity to forge deals advantageous to their constituents. Similarly, Baltimore residents and members of the city council did not have the chance to attempt to win some of the agreements brokered with investors in other cities. In San Francisco, for example, those developing office spaces larger than 50,000 square feet were required to make contributions for housing, day care, and transportation services. Boston officials required downtown developers to contribute to housing initiatives and to hire local workers, and the Chicago city government had plans to contractually link center city and neighborhood redevelopment.⁴⁵ Schaefer worried that Baltimore would have missed deals had he not circumvented the city council, and perhaps he was right. The city might have gained, however, a tourism industry and central business district that came a little less at the expense of residents, services, and the poor. Instead, as scholar Marc Levine explained about the mid-1980s, because of the infrastructure and public services costs the city incurred to maintain the redeveloped downtown area, “Baltimore annually absorb[ed] around $17 million more in city expenditures than it generate[d] in municipal revenue” (emphasis in the original).⁴⁶ City residents were footing a hefty bill for private-sector profit-making. Meanwhile, African American entrepreneurs largely had been left by the wayside. Investigators from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights assessing revitalization in Baltimore concluded that “except for deliberate and race conscious efforts, minority participation in the economic development of the city was negligible.”⁴⁷ African Americans had been excluded from most of the wealth-generating potential of downtown revitalization, and city residents had lost opportunities to make Baltimore’s new corporate residents more accountable to local needs.⁴⁸

“Further Cuts Would Render Most Programs Useless”: Service Providers During the Carter Years

As the Carter administration subsidized considerable commercial revitalization, workers in antipoverty and human-services agencies struggled to respond to mounting need with shrinking budgets. Spending cuts on the federal, state, and municipal levels left workers with fewer resources to counter problems that Carter’s anti-inflation strategies were worsening. Economic hardship compelled low-income women in their roles as caregivers to intensify the unpaid labor they put into keeping their families safe. The task of compensating for lost services often fell to them. Meanwhile, the Carter administration continued to fund the growth of the carceral state, and law enforcement increased its reach into poor and predominantly African American neighborhoods, which were simultaneously losing social services outposts. Some employees in anti-poverty and human-services agencies, as well as some African Americans in other administrative positions, continued to serve as the conscience of the city and publicly challenged the wisdom of Baltimore’s reliance on trickle-down antipoverty remedies. But antipoverty and human-services workers increasingly found themselves the targets of intensifying public hostility as growing numbers both locally and nationally identified them as a source of the nation’s economic woes.

During the second half of the 1970s, Baltimore’s public-sector workers received small budgets to solve big problems. Over the course of the decade, more than a quarter of the city’s white population left, an exodus of about 134,000 people. Median income dropped along with the revenue the city could collect from income taxes. Similarly, because many who left the city had been homeowners, the pool of those from whom the city could collect property taxes declined as well—as the number of abandoned properties grew. Simultaneously, deindustrialization cost the city both tax revenue and tens of thousands of jobs. By 1978, nearly a quarter of the population lived in substandard housing, most of which was concentrated in African American neighborhoods, and the number of residents receiving welfare was on the rise even though the city’s population was shrinking. An AFDC check for a family of four left the family at 52 percent of the poverty rate, and the addition of Food Stamps to their resources raised them to only 69 percent of the poverty level. The director of the Baltimore Department of Social Services described the benefits as “grossly inadequate,” and the editors of the Baltimore Sun warned it was “a bad time to be hungry” in the city.⁴⁹ In 1979, following nearly a decade of inflation, welfare recipients did not even receive the income the state had determined ten years earlier to be the minimum required simply for subsistence.⁵⁰

In response to fiscal constraints, Baltimore’s elected officials and agency administrators spent the late 1970s perpetually trying to balance the valid yet often conflicting concerns of service recipients in obvious and dire need of assistance; taxpayers, whose yearly tax rates surpassed those in surrounding suburbs; and public employees whose earnings were critical to their families’ and communities’ well-being and the city’s remaining tax base. Despite shared hardship, residents with low incomes faced the most severe challenges. Regardless, between 1977 and 1980, as inflation drove up prices and unemployment soared, the city reduced by a quarter its contribution to the budget of the Urban Services Agency, the unit into which the Community Action Agency and the Model Cities program had been merged. It was hard to fight poverty with bare-bones budgets. By 1980, Lenwood Ivey, the director of USA, was pleading for his budget to be restored simply to its 1977 level. “I have already cut staff substantially in all programs. Further cuts would render most programs useless,” he wrote to the mayor.⁵¹

Meanwhile, on the state level, periodic cuts culminated in large budget reductions in 1980, a recession year. The Maryland Departments of Health, Social Services, and Education each took a sizable hit. Administrators in all of the departments attempted to mitigate the effect of the cuts on service delivery with hiring freezes. The solution, while probably the most humane, was nonetheless a source of deep frustration to the city’s growing pool of job seekers. And in some cases, both layoffs and service reductions followed budget cuts. Baltimore, home to between 65 percent and 70 percent of Maryland’s low-income residents, suffered the brunt of the state’s cuts, local officials alleged. As the Carter years came to an end, the city was eliminating services by laying off workers who provided home-based care for elderly residents and those with disabilities, day care, legal services, social services in public housing facilities, and support services for battered spouses and single parents. Meanwhile, some sanitation trucks lay idle following layoffs that affected about two hundred workers, and officials in the Department of Parks and Recreation were trying to decide which playgrounds and public pools to close.⁵²

The reduced availability of services during a time of rising prices took a toll on all residents, but women with low incomes, among whom African Americans were overrepresented, paid a particularly significant price. In 1979, Elrae Singletary, a recipient of AFDC, had taken to cooking meals for her four children from scratch to avoid the expense of ready-made food. She also mixed powdered milk with regular milk and replaced shampoo with bar soap to cut down on expenses. Mary Turner, another AFDC recipient, likewise struggled with food costs. In response, she tried to keep on hand a constant stock of potatoes and other inexpensive staples to feed her children. Both women also exerted considerable effort to keep their families secure in inadequate housing. During the winter, Singletary taped plastic garbage bags over her windows to keep out the cold. She also waged unrelenting warfare against roaches and mice, and she perpetually worried about the health of her children, whom she was reluctant to allow to play outdoors because of the mounds of garbage that attracted rats in the yards of nearby abandoned homes. Turner launched a similarly unsuccessful battle against winter’s chill. She tried to compensate for cracks in her walls and insufficient funds to pay for fuel by nestling her two children in front of her oven. Her efforts kept her children warm but landed her with an exorbitant utilities bill. Worse, she contracted pneumonia and spent three days recovering in the hospital.⁵³ Reductions in city services made even more challenging the lives of families struggling to get by and added to the responsibilities of women, who attempted to personally fill service gaps.

While antipoverty and human-services providers attempted to maintain maximum programming on threadbare budgets and low-income women endeavored to make up for lost services, those engaged in crime control fared better. As historian Elizabeth Hinton argues, during the 1970s, federal investment in anticrime efforts meant that the criminal justice system filled voids left by disinvestment in the War on Poverty.⁵⁴ Among the Carter administration’s contributions to the burgeoning carceral state was the Urban Initiatives Anti-Crime Program. With the initiative, the administration attempted to shift away from the law-and-order, boots-on-the-ground approach of the Nixon administration and toward a supposedly more community-directed and social services–inclusive crime-control strategy. The Department of Housing and Urban Development rather than the Department of Justice oversaw the program, which transferred funds directly to cities rather than to states and incorporated the element of resident participation. Despite the changes, however, fighting crime rather than poverty was the objective, and the initiative enabled the continued construction of a vast law-enforcement infrastructure in low-income Black neighborhoods.

In Baltimore, municipal officials used federal anticrime funds to purchase cameras, intercom systems, and bulletproof security-guard stations in public housing units populated almost exclusively by low-income African Americans. The efforts were intended to beef up security—and surveillance.⁵⁵ Meanwhile, community participation included having residents serve as tenant security aides. A decade earlier, the Johnson administration had provided funding that enabled Baltimore residents with low incomes to earn a paycheck for providing services that directly combated poverty. During the Carter years, federal grants paid public-housing residents to police their neighbors. Certainly, security and crime gravely concerned public-housing residents. A survey conducted following the implementation of Carter’s urban anticrime initiatives, however, revealed that most believed that security had gotten worse instead of better.⁵⁶

Amid the changes, the tight grip Schaefer kept on power and his close scrutiny of staffing decisions largely quelled dissent in city agencies. “Mr. Schaefer’s greatest personality failing in office is an autocratic instinct that attracts sycophants and brands others as enemies,” opined the editors of the Baltimore Sun.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, some agency heads did voice opposition to the nation’s miserly wealth-redistribution efforts and the city’s increasing reliance on trickle-down strategies to fight poverty. They often directed their ire toward state and federal officials rather than at the mayor. Kalman Hettleman, the white director of the Department of Social Services, complained about the inadequacy of the funds the state made available to aid the poor. “What is missing in Maryland is a commitment to provide even a minimal, fair share of state resources and wealth for social service programs,” he argued.⁵⁸ More pointedly, Quentin Lawson, the city’s director of human resources and one of the few African Americans in the mayor’s cabinet, protested that President Carter’s urban commercial revitalization priorities neglected the needs of the people. The government had “traditionally emphasized … programs in physical development,” Lawson noted. What was needed was an equal commitment to a “human service plan.”⁵⁹ The critiques of state legislators and the president—but, circumspectly, usually not of the mayor—were echoed by other municipal employees.⁶⁰

Despite the assertions of protest, austerity took a toll on antipoverty and human-services agencies. In a context characterized by considerable job insecurity, many municipal workers found it difficult to sustain the spirit of defiance that had earlier characterized some in their agencies. In 1979, infighting in a community-based agency led the editors of the Afro-American to urge workers to stop “squabbl[ing] over 10 jelly beans while downtown diverts the real riches elsewhere.”⁶¹ Meanwhile, funding cuts also eroded fragile solidarities between service recipients and providers that had emerged in some cases during the 1960s and early 1970s.⁶² Echoes of past advocacy did continue, but antipoverty and human-services workers lacked the capacity to mobilize the masses as some of their predecessors once had.⁶³ Nixon, Carter, and Schaefer had rescinded the resources and the independence service providers needed to launch protests against budget austerity and local and national priorities that no longer included the poor.

Making matters worse, the antipoverty and human-services workers found themselves under increasingly withering public scrutiny. The negative attention was hardly new. War on Poverty warriors had weathered it since the 1960s, and welfare workers and other service providers had taken hits during the first half of the 1970s. But at the end of the decade, the hostility intensified. Workers were caricatured locally as well as nationally as the inefficient, lazy, and overpaid staff of the “giant bureaucracy which is dominating our lives,” in the words of one woman from Baltimore’s suburbs.⁶⁴ As had been the case through the 1970s, employees of DSS, who, like their clients were predominantly Black women, were denigrated and investigated the most. Federal officials, state’s attorneys, welfare-fraud investigators (who, along with child-support collectors, were among the few members of the DSS staff to see their numbers grow during the Carter years), and the Baltimore grand jury kept poverty-related service providers under close scrutiny. As Baltimore Sun reporter Sharon Dickman noted with empathy in 1977, “Fighting poverty lacks the glamour it had in the 1960s.”⁶⁵

Discoveries of wrongdoing in welfare-related agencies were sometimes greeted by officials with barely concealed delight. In 1977, an investigation by federal prosecutors uncovered that in Detroit and Chicago there existed among municipal employees some former welfare recipients who were still receiving benefits checks that should have been terminated. “We’re hitting two for two,” proclaimed a U.S. attorney with apparent enthusiasm that presumptions of malfeasance had been confirmed.⁶⁶ Despite the lack of proximity or clear relevance of the fraud cases to Baltimore, the Sun dispatched a reporter to cover the local angle and included a story on it on the front page. Not surprisingly, the journalist found that federal investigators in Maryland were “extremely interested” and appeared ready to launch their own local probe.⁶⁷ In a separate case the following year, “deadwood,” “inept,” “poorly-trained,” “careless,” “appalling,” and “inexcusable” were among the adjectives used in a Sun article that described the findings of a Baltimore grand jury’s recent investigation of DSS.⁶⁸ The agency’s director, Hettleman, protested as exaggerated and distracting claims of rampant inefficiency and abuse. Members of his staff made a large number of paperwork errors and had to do better, he conceded, but cases of actual fraud were rare.⁶⁹ The outraged enthusiasm among officials for launching politically popular investigations into suspected wrongdoing in social services agencies and the broad brushes used to describe DSS employees demeaned workers, who were predominantly African American women, and communicated to them that they were not trusted to do their jobs honestly or effectively.

The level of public mistrust and anger directed at antipoverty and DSS workers during the late 1970s far exceeded the ordinary frustration typically engendered by bureaucracy and governmental inefficiency. That is because it was fueled by the same dog-whistled animosity that had helped to put Richard Nixon in the White House. As arrest rates in Baltimore rapidly rose in response to the nation’s wars on crime and drugs, few officials questioned the integrity of police officers or the wisdom of new legislation that was ensnaring so many in the criminal justice system, even on minor charges. If anything, they heralded a job well done. Conversely, increases in the numbers of people receiving welfare drew harsh critiques, legal inquiries, and accusations of fraud. Welfare workers were not lauded for providing the needy with relief but instead were indicted along with so-called welfare “cheats” as supposed coconspirators in efforts to defraud the government and rob taxpayers of hard-earned dollars. The contrast in the responses to law-enforcement agents and welfare workers reflected an expectation on the part of many whites of Black criminality, an expectation with deep roots in the nation’s history but that was also a product of recent efforts by conservatives to criminalize urban African Americans. Black women, who made up many of the foot soldiers in the nation’s redistributive responses to poverty, were convenient prey to those intent on discrediting the liberal welfare state and derailing the enforcement of civil rights legislation.

“Threat to All Public Employees, Threat to All Public Services”: AFSCME Defends the Welfare State

Dog-whistle indictments of antipoverty and welfare workers helped to pave the way for an assault on the public-sector workforce writ large during the late 1970s. Certainly, conservative opponents of the regulatory state had been critical of governmental inefficiency and waste for decades. And the New Right’s fetishization of the free market also rendered much of the public sector suspect. Meanwhile, stagflation exacerbated popular frustrations over taxes, which provoked calls for smaller government. Yet critiques of anti-poverty and welfare workers—and probably also the continuing movement of African Americans into the government workforce—contributed to the notion that public-sector workers were drains on the national economy. So too did mounting anger at public-sector unions. The attacks took the form of tax revolts and calls for the privatization of public services.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States underwent a sea change in popular opinion regarding government workers. At midcentury, many American parents urged their children to apply for a government post, which often promised stable hours and a pension on retirement. Views were different during the late 1970s. As civil rights leader and Congress of Racial Equality founder James Farmer noted, “It has become high political fashion in recent years for candidates to run against ‘government,’ to vilify public employees as public leeches.” The changes worried Farmer, who by the Carter years had become the director of the Coalition of American Public Employees, an organization founded by AFSCME.⁷⁰ And although the charges originated with conservatives, Democrats were proving increasingly willing to score political points with voters by championing government downsizing. Carter also joined in the fray. In October 1978, he proposed as reforms “slash[ing]” hiring in the federal government and shrinking the federal workforce.⁷¹ The pledge signaled to the general public and those in state and local government that public-sector employees were expendable.

Anger with public-sector unions also undermined confidence in government workers. Although many Americans had sympathized with the AFSCME-affiliated Memphis sanitation workers with whom Marin Luther King had marched in 1968, within a decade many viewed the leaders of government unions as greedy rabble-rousers responsible for or associated with fiscal crisis and urban unrest. And as historian Joseph McCartin astutely notes, Democratic mayors facing fiscal crises were some of the first to face off against AFSCME. During the late 1970s, it became politically popular to woo voters with promises to take a tough stance against public-sector unions and the specter of higher taxes.⁷²

AFSCME leaders defended their members against what they called the “slanders of public workers’ inefficiency and incompetence.”⁷³ They also championed the vital public services the workers provided. At a million members strong, AFSCME became the largest union in the AFL-CIO in 1978. The union’s president, Jerry Wurf, and the secretary-treasurer, Bill Lucy, were outraged by what they identified as an aggressive reassertion of corporate and elite power over public policy during the 1970s, which they believed fueled calls for smaller government.⁷⁴ Many in AFSCME’s rank and file occupied the lowest positions in government hierarchies. The union prided itself on its success in raising the bottom of many governments’ pay scales and providing low-wage workers not only with fringe benefits and workplace protections but also upward mobility through training programs and career ladders. The union represented large numbers of women and workers of color, and the jobs they defended were invaluable to the economic security of many families and communities. So too were public services the workers provided, and AFSCME officials connected and fiercely defended both. Simultaneously, they defended collective bargaining in the public sector and their own legitimacy.⁷⁵

AFSCME officials connected critiques of public-sector unions to wider campaigns to weaken the American labor movement. The late 1970s was a challenging period for organized labor. Manufacturers’ quest to save on labor costs fueled the continuing deindustrialization of what was becoming the rust belt. The changes eroded the strength of industrial unions, earlier the lifeblood of the labor movement.⁷⁶ Meanwhile, as historian Lane Windham argues, private-sector employers in the nation’s growing service sector were defiantly—and sometimes illegally—resisting unionization campaigns that would have extended union protection to workers previously ignored by the leaders of industrial unions. At the same time, Carter, who as president served as the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party, failed to back labor-law reform that would have made union organizing easier. All the while, a new antiunion consultancy industry, which would help employers fight off union drives, was gaining steam.⁷⁷ AFSCME leaders’ efforts to defend their union and its members were not going to be easy.

To be sure, public-sector union leaders sometimes provided their critics with legitimate grounds for frustration. In keeping with practices widespread in both public- and private-sector unions, AFSCME leaders defended their members in termination disputes even when the members’ actions were seemingly indefensible. Moreover, union officials often categorically resisted government downsizing and the contracting out to the private sector services previously provided by the government—even in instances when such practices might have eliminated inefficiencies or otherwise served the common good. AFSCME undeniably had a vested interest in “big government,” which union leaders largely continued to understand as a labor-movement victory—the source of regulations and services critical to the public welfare and a healthy democracy. And they described themselves and their members as the guardians of the American welfare state. Certainly, their claims might have been better received had their local leaderships more consistently engaged in coalition-building and sought partnerships with the recipients and users of public services. Nevertheless, they accurately identified anti–public sector union rhetoric as a strategy in a larger campaign to erode the social safety net, undermine organized labor as a whole, and shift resources up the economic ladder. And they were gravely disappointed that so many failed to appreciate their significance.⁷⁸

Yet many did. Anger at the government, its workers, and their unions manifested itself most starkly in suburban tax revolts and mounting enthusiasm for privatization, which included transferring government functions to the private sector. AFSCME fiercely combated both. In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which imposed limits on government spending by capping property taxes. The measure alarmed but did not surprise Wurf. The AFSCME leader had been anticipating such a “Threat to All Public Employees, Threat to All Public Services” for some time.⁷⁹ In response, the union worked in states across the country to prevent similar campaigns from meeting with success. In addition, they continued to press elected officials for more progressive taxing formulas, which would shift more of the burden for funding public services to those with the highest incomes and off the shoulders of those of more modest means.

Meanwhile, AFSCME officials bitterly opposed the practice of contracting out, which they equated with putting up a “government for sale” sign, and warned that such arrangements promoted corruption and graft. As an AFSCME representative argued, “Some of the leaders of the anti-public employee chorus are businessmen who are trying to get their hands on more government dollars through lucrative contracts.”⁸⁰ AFSCME leaders pointed out that the practice of contracting out circumvented merit-system reforms that many governments had adopted nearly a century earlier to prevent politicians from using access to government resources to reward campaign contributors and amass power. Inflated contracts, political kickbacks, and price-fixing could result when the government invited the private sector to play a role in service provision, AFSCME leaders insisted. Indeed, as union leaders pointedly reminded Americans, former Maryland governor and U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew had recently resigned from the Nixon administration in disgrace as a consequence of his involvement in such chicanery. Contracting out also contributed to diluting civic culture because decisionmaking fell to unelected consultants rather than citizens. Service provision became the domain of those potentially more attentive to profit margins than the public’s welfare. While the business model served an important role in American society, its principles were not applicable to all dimensions of public life, government union leaders warned.⁸¹

“Poverty on Its Fringes”: The Efficacy of Tourism

AFSCME leaders’ spirited defense of American welfare liberalism and government workers hardly reversed the course of national events or the direction of urban planning in Baltimore. A momentous political realignment was under way in the United States, and Schaefer had a clear vision for his city’s postindustrial revitalization. And bolstered by financial assistance from the federal and state governments and the business savvy of his trustees, the mayor executed his plans with limited interference. The results were undeniably impressive. The city’s waterfront redevelopment was a commercial success. In 1981, Harborplace, the Rouse-designed mall, attracted eighteen million, more people than visited Disneyland the same year.⁸² But the economic benefits did not trickle down in the manner Schaefer had suggested they would. Residents may have gotten a psychological reward as a result of Baltimore’s facelift, but the best-paying jobs, researchers soon found, went to suburban commuters even as city taxpayers took the hit for infrastructure costs. Meanwhile, during the 1970s, the poverty rate increased in the vast majority of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.⁸³ Rising income inequality led some to start speaking of the existence of not one but “two Baltimores—one Black and poor, the other white and largely well off.”⁸⁴ The claim was not entirely accurate. Baltimore had sizable African American working- and middle-class populations, among whom public-sector employees were numerous. Nevertheless, at the bottom of the economic ladder, race and class were becoming indistinguishable. And as the mayor’s critics noted, trickle-down remedies to urban poverty did little to solve the problem.

Western High School student Felicia Willett was one such critic. In 1979, she wrote to Schaefer, “I would like to know why, when the city wanted to build the project for the Inner Harbor, the city managed to find a few million dollars for it. There are people who are starving, living in homes without heat, and people living in homes with [more] roaches and rats than the number of people living in the house. Mr. Mayor, I know the Harbor is important to the growth of the city but the people should also be considered.”⁸⁵ The mayor replied to Willett as he did to the many others who expressed similar frustrations. He argued that downtown redevelopment reflected not necessarily his personal policy preference but the efforts of entrepreneurs and officials in Annapolis and Washington, DC. “Many of the improvements in the Inner harbor are not the result of City funds,” the mayor explained. “A very large percentage of the monies spent is the result of private investments and the City’s ability to successfully lobby for specific state and federal grants, that were in many incidents, earmarked to assist in the development of the kinds of improvements realized in the harbor.”⁸⁶

The mayor’s defense was true but did not tell the whole story. Carter had steered his party sharply to the right. He pursued macroeconomic policies best suited to the interests of Wall Street, and he responded to urban problems by subsidizing trickle-down solutions. Baltimore was hardly in a position to forge its own path independent of outside aid, so the mayor pursued public-private partnerships. But that had also been his preference. And he had adopted commercial revitalization strategies while subverting the democratic process. By so doing, he robbed city residents and city council members of opportunities to at least consider alternatives or negotiate deals that served public as well as private ends. Quickly it became apparent that Carter’s and Schaefer’s trickle-down remedies were inadequate solutions to the city’s urgent and in some cases worsening problems. On the same day that Schaefer took his acclaimed dip with the seals at the city’s new harbor-front aquarium, an opinion piece in the Evening Sun by a former public-school counselor expressed a view not unlike Willett’s. Certainly Baltimore’s downtown renaissance was a boon to a city plagued by decades of deindustrialization, depopulation, and decline. “But,” Leon Lerner wrote, “can it not be said that the enormous success of Harborplace is diminished by the poverty on its fringes?”⁸⁷