Shuttered storefronts and vacant office buildings have challenged Baltimore’s civic leaders for years and, while they clearly haven’t solved the problem yet, they’ve come up with creative ways to hide it.

Among the Potemkin Village touches employed to disguise vacant downtown storefronts are fanciful murals of better days, fading sports banners, photo-montages showing pretty people sipping champagne, gaily painted plywood window covers, and artsy, edgy graffiti.

(The graffiti doesn’t appear to have been a line item in anyone’s budget, it’s just being allowed to remain on downtown surfaces. Graffiti removal funds were, in fact, cut in the mayor’s 2012 spending plan, so look for more of this default window-dressing in the future.)

The tradition of making faux facades to mask troubled real estate has a long history – going back to the fake settlements purportedly erected at the direction of Grigory Potyomkin to fool Russian Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787.

While the history of architectural window dressing in America is hazy – we know it was used in the Wild West to mask fraudulent land deals and to impress 19th century tourists passing on a train – it’s been well-documented in recent times.

In 1982, for example, New York City’s Mayor Ed Koch caused a stir when he had workers put decals with plants and Venetian blinds over the windows of abandoned buildings in The Bronx to hide the blight.

Anyway, The Brew was inspired to photograph some of the street-level cover-ups in the downtown after the release of reports (by task forces created by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Downtown Partnership) detailing high office vacancy rates in Charles Center and elsewhere.

We found a pattern:

Window dressing in the central city tends toward slick, institutional scenes of city living. The 100 block of East Baltimore Street is one example; another is the shuttered Jefferson Building that’s right around the corner from Downtown Partnership’s promotional offices at 217 N. Charles Street.

Imagery of lounging, laughing urbanites dominates a series of empty rehabbed storefronts in the “loft” buildings clustered around West Baltimore and Eutaw streets.

A different vista permeates Howard Street north of Saratoga. Here where the city’s retail heart has turned sclerotic, derelict buildings are dressed-up in raw Wild West style.

Here are some examples that caught our eye: