The city’s encirclement of the Inner Harbor with a chain-link fence for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve fireworks is not just about police protection. It’s about defining a “safe place” where people can be free from fear about crime.

The city’s experience during the Inner Harbor’s Fourth of July celebrations, where a man was fatally stabbed and a 4-year-old boy shot in the leg, demonstrated that even the presence of 600 police officers does not necessarily make the public safe – and may even heighten anxieties.

On the other hand, being inside a fenced area during September’s Grand Prix races gave attendees a sense of protection from the outside world, although it also discouraged them from visiting and patronizing businesses outside the fence.

Defensible Space

The objective is to create spaces where good social influences can outweigh the bad. This is nothing new. Fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs wrote in Death and Life of Great American Cities how the spatial relationships between streets and adjacent buildings are crucial to maintaining social order and vitality and, even more importantly, the perception of them.

From this, cities learned that streets are not just streets. They are a social order. There needs to be a clearly-defined spatial hierarchy between visitors and strangers on the one hand, and the residents and business people who feel a sense of ownership of the space – guiding everyone to and fro.

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Revelers coming to the fireworks tomorrow night will be confronted with a six-foot fence starting at the east end of Rash Field and wrapping around the Inner Harbor before ending at Pratt Street adjacent to Pier 6. Nine gates on Pratt, Light St. and Key Highway will provide access the waterfront. Live music will begin at 9 p.m. at the amphitheater at Pratt and Light. Fireworks will erupt at midnight and last about 18 minutes. There is no admission charge.
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The streetscape is the turf where all this plays out, most notably in places like New York’s Times Square, which is the model for urban New Year’s celebrations.

But unlike Times Square, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is not built around streets. Its main streets are traffic arteries, first and foremost, which overwhelm all comparatively feeble attempts at establishing a spatial order between the stakeholders and the interlopers. Waterfront buildings such as Harborplace are oriented to the water, not the streets, and even the sidewalks were designed to be segregated from the streets by earth berms.

Baltimore has this problem elsewhere as well. Mount Vernon, historically the premiere neighborhood for the urbane and opulent, has been overrun by heavy traffic throughout the century-long reign of the automobile. This has ultimately crushed any significant effort to create a social order enforced by those who live and work there.

The city does have a $100 million plan to “reinvent” Pratt Street around the Inner Harbor, but it is based on attracting a huge amount of new retail space in what is mostly now street right-of-way, at a time when existing retail in Harborplace is struggling and new stores appear more likely to go to Harbor East or, if it’s ever built, to the Howard Street “Superblock.”

The Pratt Street plan represents little functional change from the status quo, other than more trees and fewer berms, with the same domination by the traffic flow.

Wisteria Lane Comes to Baltimore

And that’s where the city’s new fencing plan comes in. It’s based not on the Jane Jacobs urban model of defensible space, but on the suburban “cul-de-sac” model.

The fenced-in area increases the amount of space perceived as private and under control, at the expense of the space seen as outside of control. Cul-de-sacs are highly valued in suburban real estate, but at the expense of those who live on the outside.

In suburban areas with small societies (think “Desperate Housewives”) this is manageable. The outsiders are a negligible group.

But in Baltimore, the area outside the Inner Harbor New Year’s fence will include virtually all of downtown. While some of this turf is certainly controllable, such as the well-trod paths from the harbor to the major parking garages , it is impossible to control the countless spaces and recesses that make up all the urban streetscapes.

Only well-designed social orders can do that.

A City Oriented to Streets, not Traffic

Erecting a New Year’s fence around the Inner Harbor is probably a logical course for a city that has been plagued by crime perceptions and recently basked in some fleeting success with the Grand Prix.

But like the Grand Prix, the New Year’s Eve fireworks is a special effort for a special event, which ignores the fact that the problems of security and a viable urban environment are problems the city faces every day, and which constantly thwart its daily functioning.

Baltimore needs to be a 365-day-a-year city, not just one that lives from one special event to the next.

The long-term solution should be to make Baltimore a street-oriented city, especially the Inner Harbor. Pratt Street needs to be given a total reinvention, not just a pricey facelift.

Traffic must be truly managed instead of tolerated, or even encouraged, in the name of feeding the real-estate development machine. Superior transit needs to be built into the environment, not merely isolated into tunnels and highway medians.

A fenced off-Inner Harbor makes sense in itself, but it provides further evidence that Baltimore has ignored the basics of smart urban design as its leaders chase one grand spectacle after another.