Reinventing the Suburbs: Towson MD

The suburbs of Washington, D.C. were an excellent petri dish for the graduation of suburban centers into real places. The granddaddy of this process may be Bethesda, followed by Silver Spring. More recently, Tysons Corner, the essence of a non-place, has not only been re-imagined but is in the middle of a reincarnation as a mixed-use center. Then there is Pentagon City, Ballston, and Clarendon (all transit oriented development centers in Arlington County) and, of course, Reston, the new town which is not so much a reinvented suburb, as an urban center conceived from whole cloth. More conversions are in the making, most notably Rockville Pike, which as a suburb had become also a poster child of suburban misery.

Towson at the crossroads:Old and new
(photo: ArchPlan Inc.)

Lately, the Baltimore area is picking up the pace, particularly Towson, the seat of the Baltimore county government where the court house is located, and which has always been the county's most notable place. Baltimore County's "new town" centers, Owings Mills and White Marsh never could and still cannot hold a candle to successful places. They were designated as centers in the seventies as part of Baltimore County's "smart growth" strategies of keeping growth inside the urban rural demarcation line (URDL), but remained far from becoming real urban spaces. They were far too influenced by suburban car-oriented principles (even though Owings Mills has a metro rail connection and recently was designated as a TOD). Towson, which was long derided as a sleepy burg or loved as a historic community with a small town feel, depending on one's perspective, is quickly becoming the most urban place outside Baltimore City.  This non-incorporated town of about 55,000 residents is rapidly transforming into something new thanks to a slew of large-scale developments which are proposed, under review or already constructed. Naturally the transformation is causing both anxieties and aspirations. When the County Executive touts his town as "the next Bethesda," residents counter that they deserve better than that.

Not that Towson has truly been a sleepy county seat "with small town feel" until just recently. Already in the seventies and eighties it had seen it’s fair share of the type of "urban renewal" development that gave that term a bad reputation. Towson (like Bethesda) features bad architecture en masse, from the One Investment Place Tower (that recently underwent a radical make-over by the national development company Caves Valley which is headquartered in Towson) to Towson

the less than inspiring examples of seventies
and  eighties architecture

the new Towson Courthouse

Towson tower residential; A landmark of sorts
(photo: ArchPlan)

Commons, a 1992
downtown multiplex that failed soon after it opened and was recently reborn as a LA Fitness center, to the fortress-like Circuit Court building. Towsontown Mall plays a special role, mostly for its giant size but then also for its aspiration of integrating a full-size mall into an urban setting. The mall went through various face-lifts which sought to make it more presentable to the street, but the outcome is still a mixed blessing and the question remains whether it is synergistic or parasitic to downtown Towson.

Towson, urban mall after face-lift

In a way Towson has been a small version of Houston or Atlanta or other cities that lost whatever historic fabric they had in favor of urban renewal, bypasses and lots and lots of parking. The result is an incoherent mess of brutal scale and style juxtapositions and a patchwork of surface parking lots that pockmark all blocks and mar any walk through downtown. On the plus side, unlike Bethesda and Silver Spring which started out quite the same way, Towson has a very walkable grid system without superblocks and, refreshingly, there are no expressways bisecting it. The most disruptive roadways are intermittent pieces of a bypass which forms an incomplete ring road that does not follow the grid.

Towson also saw significant investment just before and even during the great recession. 2,600

Towson Palisades under construction
(it is completed by now)

apartments and townhomes have been completed in the last ten years or so in projects such as the Towson Promenade on York Road north of downtown, or the Palisades on Washington Avenue.

There have been at least as many plans and attempts at controlling growth and design as there have been projects. Towson plans have been conceived, drawn, and redrawn, starting with the quaint 1992 Towson Community Plan, followed by a 2006 Urban Action Team operation and right on its heels in 2007 a full blown "walkable Towson" charrette. Towson has a CT overlay zone, "alternative" approval procedures, mandatory design review and a host of ad hoc council bills trying to exempt or control one thing or another. None of this, though, provides any assurances to nearby residents or to developers. The review and approval process is at best obtuse. Citizens, united in the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations, some 30 associations and 60 communities, tend to think that developers always get what they want. Mike Ertel the current president of the association discussed his view

Walkable Towson plan

recently for a profile for the Baltimore Sun. He is straining to sound like a reasonable guy who is not anti-development, but one can sense his desperation stemming from the prevailing lack of convincing design quality.

So, will the big projects Towson Square (a 15 screen multiplex with various shops and restaurants almost complete), 101 York Road (248 student apartments) and Towson Row (a one million square foot, $350 million, 350 apartment and 200 room hotel development with 100,000 sf of retail and 1500 parking spaces) make Towson that 24/7 vibrant, walkable, community that attracts millennial and the urban "creative class"? The nearly completed Towson Square is not a good omen for what may still be ahead. It has structured parking, touts a connection between "main street" (York Road) and the aforementioned mall, has restaurants, shops and a huge entertainment building as well as an equally huge parking garage, but it isn't of the caliber that would put Towson "on the map" in the manner that Santana Row (San Jose), Bethesda Row or the Silver Spring town-center developments did for those places.  A 15-screen,

Towson Square development near completion
(photo: ArchPlan)

3600 seat movie-plex and a 850 car garage are just not the kind of buildings that make good neighbors or are easy to fit into a setting where essentially all fours sides have to be good. Yes, the development has stairs leading down towards York Road, but one has to pass dumpsters and blank walls along the way. Yes, the restaurants and shops are luring movie goers to walk outside the movieplex and along a path that leads to the mall, but to get to the mall one has to cross Joppa Road, and then encounter a steep car ramp and a retaining wall on the other side. Towson Square graces Delaware and Virginia Avenues with garage entrances and essentially blank walls. In short, the development is like a bull in the china store

big blank walls are the hallmarks of this
movieplex and giant garage
(photo: ArchPlan)

of the surrounding small scale fabric of old Towson.

Next in line is Towson Row, bigger than Towson Square, and located in maybe a less sensitive and small-scale setting. In the recent "public input" meeting, citizens responded generally in a friendly manner, and seemed to be hopeful about the project. However, they lamented the lack of good urban spaces with "pizzaz".

For now, all that citizens have to look at is a series of renderings prepared by the Baltimore architecture firm that look as if they were drawn by hand and water colored (computers can do this these days). None of what is drawn looks wrong or like bad design. Massing is broken up into credible chunks of high and low buildings which line the streets, a corner is well articulated, materials change, there is lots of glass, retail on the first floor, even two green roofs, lots of sidewalk space, street trees and the hint of an urban plaza on a new interior connecting road dubbed Towson Row. That is the only "open space" and the area which seems to draw the most criticism. Indeed, it is questionable whether pedestrians would venture into this street inside the block that also serves as the access for parking and services, and if these shared functions can coexist successfully. Comments at the community meeting indicated that residents had severe doubts about how wonderful this amenity space really is, obligatory fountain notwithstanding.

proposed development Towson Row
(Rendering: Design Collective)

Interestingly, residents of nearby communities had more to-the-point suggestions and critique than the professionals that make up the Design Review Panel that reviewed the project a week after the public meeting. The master developer, Caves Valley, has no plan to develop all three blocks by themselves and, absent binding and detailed county rules, selected to have their architect prepare a comprehensive set of design guidelines. The objective of that self made design manual is to maintain a certain control over the various yet unknown developers and architects that will develop individual parts of the assembly. The design review panel was asked to accept these guidelines in that first review session after they saw an hour-long presentation by the developer and his architect which confirmed my initial impression that they aspire to a pretty high level of quality. The panelists noted gratefully that the guidelines reflected many of the points those previous mostly advisory Towson documents and plans had made and which could have easily been ignored. It was no surprise, then, that the panel approved the guidelines

The footprint of the proposed Towson Row
development with the disputed interior
plaza (photo: ArchPlan)

unanimously with some small amendments. It will be interesting to see, how useful future reviews will be, when all the panel has to go by are the developer's own guidelines.

Several larger questions were touched upon by the commenting citizens (but not the panelists, including the lack of open space, the issues of sustainable design, and impacts on nearby residents. Some issues weren't addressed at all. For example: While the concept design and the guidelines do everything by the book, they fail to create or prescribe an iconic building or even an iconic space. Possibly they may not even permit anything out of the ordinary or iconic. With so much detail being ordained it will be hard to free building designs to a point that one of the buildings could become a landmark, even though this gateway location would certainly warrant an iconic structure.

For the added midblock street one resident suggested to see if services can’t be separated from the proposed civic space. If that proves impossible, the design could give up on placing the plaza in the rear and open it more up to York Road, Towson’s main commercial drag. As it currently stands, the corner access from the southeast is vital to success for that open space, but from that corner the plaza is 12’ up on top of a garage deck, a pretty torturous route for a naval chord like this where the alternative pedestrian routes to the back look either bleak or circuitous. 

Another big question is how all these big proposed developments hang together, especially how Towson Row addresses the proposed student housing development immediately across the street to the south. 101 York Road (a PUD also on the agenda) and Towson Row really need to be studied together because only jointly can they make the segment of the bypass that they both face an integral part of downtown. So far, the student housing project has no intention of “having a dialogue” with Towson Row. As it stands, neither citizens, the council or the planning department have the tools in hand to force such a collaboration.

The only real larger open spaces are around the old and
new courthouse

Somewhat late and under duress, the County's planning department is now charged with re-writing the town center overlay zone, an undertaking that would create the bigger context, especially if it were accompanied by some sort of core masterplan that would take the approach the Towson Row developer took and expand it for the entire core area.  Such a plan could address the open space issues, address where the main pedestrian pathways and routes should be and regulate the transition areas at the edges where downtown meets the neighborhoods. It should also deal with parking and the lack of meaningful transit. (There is talk about a Towson circulator bus).  But for Towson Square and probably also Towson Row the horse is already out of the barn. 

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who recently visited the US and debated Global Cities with Bruce Katz and San Diego's Mayor Kevin Faulconer at the Brookings Institution in DC, is so infatuated with the now thirty year string of success of his city that he exclaimed that "the cities have made it, it is now time to worry about the suburbs." In the Baltimore metro region the reversal of roles between city and suburb isn't quite so clear yet. Small parts of Baltimore are, indeed, gleaming. It has also become apparent for some time that the older so called "inner ring suburbs" are suffering from the same combination of problems that last century all but killed Baltimore and many other "legacy" cities: increasing poverty, declining educational attainment and sinking incomes.

The old Towson Courthouse provides authenticity and
is still as standard against which new development can be measured
(photo: ArchPlan)

In this new paradigm, suburban centers have to exhibit the features that a new generation of dwellers is looking for in the same way their center cities are trying to do it. Freezing in time is not an option, not for Towson nor for any other place that wants to thrive and attract those residents who make quality of life one of their primary criteria when they decide where to live. With little historic substance and without the great traditions of urban parks, the reinvention of the suburbs represent a larger challenge than the renaissance of legacy cities. While suburban centers can embrace mixed use, walkability and even civic space, they will have a much harder time to remain or become authentic. Great is the danger that in the end, not only will the various "rows" and squares" have similar names, but also use the same generic formulas which will make them indistinguishable from identical architectural tricks, chain stores and streetscaping. The reinvented suburban centers could easily become as much "anywhere USA" as the suburban malls that preceded them.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

edited by Ben Groff

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Related Articles on this Blog:
Reinventing the Suburb - the new Tyson
Is Small Town America the Home of Happiness?
20 years of Smart Growth. What are the Results?
What the New Town of Columbia can Teach us
The Mall is Dead


External Sources:

Baltimore Magazine: The Great Towson Revival
Baltimore Sun, Zoning approved for Towson Row
Baltimore Sun: 101 York Road
Towson Urban Design Principles
Its Towson's Time: Video