Do Cities Need Sugar Daddies?

The triangle of power, cities and architecture may be best illustrated by Cosimo de Medici. Son of Florentine banker who bested his competitor, Cosimo had so much wealth that he was able to direct the Florentine political system. He soon looked beyond money and politics, and attempted an impossible architectural feat: covering the gigantic dome of Florence, which had remained uncovered for quite some time. Success meant construction of the largest span of roof ever attempted.  When Cosimo engaged the architect Bruneleschi and the dome was built, the accomplishment led his home-town to flourish, laying the cornerstone for what would eventually be known as the Renaissance.

Cosimo Medici 

There are many examples of cities that flourish when powerful interests take hold. The German Hanse, a trade-guild, brought success to a whole series of German port cities. John W. Garret brought wealth and power to Baltimore when he started his B&O Railroad empire here, and he built a number of memorable structures that still bring Baltimore glory.

But history also shows that such patronage has a flip side. Under the Medici the Republican form of government practiced in Florence was warped into one of nearly absolute power, where the Medici became duchesses and made even the Pope a puppet of their regime.

Industrialization made corporate power the standard model, with big corporations having an almost complete and feudal hold on entire towns and cities, small (Bethlehem, PA and Bethlehem Steel), large (Detroit with the "Big Three") and in between (Pittsburgh and Carnegie Steel). From growing up in a town dominated by one employer, I know: When the corporation sneezes, the town gets a fever.

And today? Did full corporate power come to an end in an era of distributed power, with citizens in control whether they are employed by the company or not? Corporate monopolies must surely be a thing of the past in the age of "Occupy," petitions, referenda, propositions, recalls, market disruption, and internet shit-storms, right?

Or are the new-age IT giants of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook the new Medici, now on a global scale? Are cities in these days of public poverty more than ever dependent on bankers, insurance companies, corporations and big developers? Many would argue that big money still pulls all the strings, especially in cities where all politics are supposedly local. As proof they point to the huge divisions between glamour and misery which are especially evident and glaring in the big cities where average life expectancy of populations can vary by 20 years over just a few miles.

What made me consider these questions is the emergence of a new power house in Baltimore after decades of losing out on headquartering Fortune 500 firms. A strong voice is emerging from semi-hiding in Baltimore, making quite strong statements that were all over the press last week.

Receration Pier
(rendering

'"Why not make it great?'  "The one thing I'll tell you is I just want to do great things. I just want to be involved in projects that are great and build things that have people go 'wow.' One of my passions in life is I love blowing people's minds." 

I never want to be beholden to a vote of some board or politics or anyone else."We have the means and we don't have to ask anybody permission," [we] need more space and we tried building here and got voted down. People basically said we don't think you should keep growing here. And we said, 'Why are we allowing you to say that.'" 

It has been some time that anybody in Baltimore sounded so confident, so bold and so fearless. Who is this person who spoke like this? Not the Mayor, certainly not the Planning Director, not the new Chief of Economic Development. Not one of the developers who typically couch their projects in terms of community needs and would never question so blatantly why people are allowed to say no. No, the one who said this is the CEO of a local start-up who has catapulted his company from his grandmother’s basement to three billion dollars of sales in just 18 years. (see the company history here).

“We have a chip on our shoulder, and that chip doesn’t go away, because there’s not a finish line,” he said. “It’s not about hitting some number. It’s much greater than that, and frankly, it’s much more purposeful than that.”

He who spoke those words, it seems, could easily sit down with Cosimo de Medici over a drink and the two would have a blast, even though it may take the Florentine banker some time to get used to his companion's own brand of rye whiskey.

Kevin Plank and Under Armour logo

Of course, I am talking about Under Armour's CEO Kevin Plank and his sports apparel company, headquartered in Baltimore in what used to be a Proctor and Gamble Soap factory overlooking the Baltimore Harbor. After he bought this place cheaply from a visionary local developer who tripped during the Great Recession, Plank has quickly establishing himself  not only as a global sports brand but also as a new Baltimore powerhouse. "Will we soon live in Underarmourland?" someone commented under a recent online newspaper article about the company.


Plank's ambitions as a developer came first into focus when he acquired the dilapidated Recreational Pier in Baltimore's historic Fells Point neighborhood, straight across from his current headquarters. Cynics suspected right away that looking across the water from his headquarter, he just couldn't stand the sad look of the sagging Recreation Pier which had its last great moment as a make-believe police headquarter in the TV series The Wire. Various attempts at using this prime piece of real estate for a hotel had failed due to the disproportionately high cost of fixing the rotting piles on which this pier building stands, cost that sinks any normal pro-forma. Kevin Plank doesn't have to care about a pro-forma, he is trying "to tell a story" and as it turns out, his story isn't all that different from what the cynics had assumed right away:

"We tell stories for a living — we tell great stories and we build products to support those stories,"  "When [visitors] come here, I want them to have a proper hotel to stay at." 

Kevin Litten of the Business Journal writes in his article about Plank and the Pier project:

Plank said in an interview Monday the hotel is part of a strategy to provide Under Armour guests with a unique Baltimore experience. That will include allowing people to depart the Under Armour headquarters in Tide Point on an authentic Chesapeake Bay crab boat, voyage across the Inner Harbor and arrive in style at the hotel. 

Port Covington area today (Bing aerial)

When it came to light that it was Plank's development arm Sagamore Development LLC that was indeed behind a number of more or less furtive acquisitions in Port Covington, a dysfunctional former railyard and industrial site along the Middle Branch portion of Baltimore's Harbor, the Kevin Plank story went into overdrive. Port Covington is a sprawling weedscape with a hodge-podge of previous re-use efforts sitting around without much rhyme and reason, a temporary cruise ship terminal, a Sun newspaper printing facility, and an abandoned Walmart and Sam's Club, both ill-advised,windowless waterfront big boxes from a time when Baltimore wanted to be more like the suburbs.

Plank now controls 128 acres, a good chunk of land in any city. He has started to open up the big boxes for his Under Armour operations combined with seemingly in-congruent activities with Plank’s hobbies as their common denominator such as a barn for Baltimore's police horses (Plank is a horse lover and owns a race horse named Sagamore) and a whiskey distillery that will make a label called, you guessed it: Sagamore's Spirit and import the water from Plank's Sagamore Farm up in the north county. The distillery, has already been moved into schematic design and has been presented to the city's design review panel without eliciting the promised "wows" or gasps over it's greatness.

Sagamore Spirit, a proposed whiskey distillery
(ASG rendering)

What is Baltimore to make of these activities? Could a rich and successful, highly-driven entrepreneur with a can-do attitude be exactly what this city needs? A city that has been for too long accustomed to a beggar's mentality of "any development is better than nothing," and which is full of people who think that if the city is  not doomed, it is at least condemned to a defeatist attitude under the motto "this will never work in Baltimore." Can Plank bring a Renaissance to this City, like Cosimo?


Or is he a 21st century's variation of John W. Garret, or Morris Mechanic, Jim Rouse, or Harry Weinberg, all men who left their imprint on this city, some of them by first raiding it before giving back (an all-to common patronage trajectory)? Harry Weinberg, "Honolulu Harry," for example made a fortune in real estate in Baltimore and then fled the burg for Honolulu leaving behind a tangle of vacant buildings which significantly contributed to the decline of Baltimore's once proud retail core in what is now called the Westside.  His legacy has been largely forgotten as his posthumous foundation has used his vast assets for decades to fund dozens of community medical facilities all across the metro region, all now carrying the Weinberg name.

John W. Garret, founder of the B&O

Maybe we don't need to go as far back as those folks and, instead, look at John Paterakis, the baker-turned-developer as an example. He, a second generation immigrant from Greece built his father's bakery into a giant operation that to this day bakes rolls for all the McDonald’s franchises east of the Mississippi. Like Plank, Paterakis went into development as a second career and in his case only after former Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer pushed him to do so. Paterakis teaming up with a trained architect-developer created Harbor East, Baltimore's shiny downtown extension full of New York style restaurants and glitzy retail. But as it is with most sugar-daddies, he did not only give, he also knew how to take: City investments, support and tax breaks came his way.The City actually paid for the repair of the area's dilapidated bulkheads, built a waterfront promenade and constructed all of the development’s  infrastructure including water, sewer, streets, sidewalks and public art.  In spite of this public largesse, Paterakis' flagship Marriott hotel tower still pays only $1 in annual property taxes.


His former development partner just received a $115 million TIF for infrastructure to develop the adjacent capped brownfield peninsula now dubbed HarborPoint which used to be home of Allied Signal. The Paterakis example is interesting because he was so reluctant to even get into the game that needed him more than he needed it.. But once he did develop, he did it old style, with his own money, just like Plank is doing on the Rec Pier. In spite of the 25 year property tax break on the flagship hotel, one can hardly dispute that the city coffers come out ahead compared to the land sitting fallow.
Plank has already indicated that for his new corporate campus at Port Covington he will seek City support as well.
Cosimo de Medici fretted that "50 years from now...we will be expelled, but my buildings will live on." He was wrong about the 50 years.  After the first Cosimo's death in 1464 his clan stayed in power for over 250 years. The patronage of the Medici’s brought the world Michelangelo and countless other artists including Leonardo da Vinci, but tellingly also the writing of Machiavelli. By 1718 the reign of the clan was finally over and a bankrupt Florence had to beg northern countries for money. The Duomo die Firenze is still the Tuscan city's most notable landmark, certainly an inspiration for those who want to ensure a legacy.

Microsoft Campus Redmond near Seattle, WA 

Can Baltimore flourish through the help of large corporations and egos but avoid abuse of power? Are modern leaders from Steve Jobs to Larry Page and from Zuckerberg to Plank enlightened enough to lead their cities forward into a future that moves too quickly for our elected governments? Can history even be consulted for advice?

The campus towns of Mountain View, Redmond and Cupertino suggest a more insular approach to city building than the Medici had taken. It remains to be seen if Googles scan of the world's books will compare to Alexander the Great's famous library in Alexandria or if Apple's new headquarters will ever be considered in the same breath as the Duomo a Firenze.  For all the talk

Apple campus, Cupertino, CA

about openness and transparency, the corporate Google campus is almost as secluded and insular as the smokestack plants of the Guilded Age with their heavily guarded factory gates. Maybe Plank's architectural ambitions will give Baltimore something different than Apple's new fortress, but his dismissive talk about boards and others who dared to impede on his trajectory would suggest that his aspirations to "wow" the citizens may not necessarily be social and his forays into whiskey as deeply steeped into culture as those

Google campus, Mountain View, CA

of the Meyerhoffs, the Mechanics, or the Carnegies and Mellons.

In a city that foremost suffers from deep inequality and entrenched poverty, real progress must be made in neighborhoods by investments that are incremental, calibrated at each turn, coordinated and planned in close collaboration with the people of the communities in which they take place. That is a much less flashy approach and it may well be underpinned by corporate wealth. As for that kind of sugar daddy, one witha more direct impact on the lives of the community, Baltimore's Thibault Mannekin and his Seawall Development comes to mind, carefully nudging the Baltimore community of Remington into a brighter future. Or MICA, which uses its academic power to nurse and grow and brand new arts district.

The Duomo in Florence, Italy

Plank's big gestures are fine, they may help Baltimore to get over its inferiority complex, they may even get some projects done that nobody else could have. His mega successful Under Armour corporation is certainly important for the economy of this city.  But today, a sustainable city renaissance cannot be done from the top down using a trickle down philosophy. The real boost has to come from collaboration and from within the community.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff

Check out my compendium blog for daily posts: Community Architect DAILY

Links and Sources:
The Medici and Florence, Elizabeth Terrell Graham
The Medici on PBS
The Origins of Patronage, British Journal of Science
Kevin Plank sees Rec Pier as an Extension of Under Armour  (Baltimore Business Journal)
Real estate speculation and rumors around Under Armour (Baltimore Business Journal)
Fred Scharmen's 2009 Blog about Port Covington