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BALTIMORE MARKETPLACE: AN URBAN SUCCESS

BALTIMORE MARKETPLACE: AN URBAN SUCCESS; An Appraisal

BALTIMORE MARKETPLACE: AN URBAN SUCCESS; An Appraisal
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February 18, 1981, Section A, Page 18Buy Reprints
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This seems to be the year of Baltimore. This old seaport city, which has had a relationship to Washington not unlike that of Oakland to San Francisco or Newark to New York, has put great effort into changing its image. It has built office, apartment and hotel towers downtown, it has restored old town houses and it has turned the Inner Harbor, the portion of the shoreline closest to downtown, into a mixture of shopping, entertainment and cultural facilities.

Baltimore has, in short, been trying to get on the bandwagon of such cities as Boston and San Francisco. It wants to be thought of not as a harsh, crime-ridden city, but as a community of middle-class professionals, all in love with the idea of living in a vibrant downtown.

National magazines, thrilled to discover another Cinderella among cities, have filled their pages with color photographs of Baltimoreans sitting in chic new cafes and shopping for exotic produce in expensive new markets. Waterfront Marketplace

Most of the publicity has focused on one particular area, a development called Harborplace, right beside the water at the Inner Harbor. Harborplace is a mixture of restaurants, shops, boutiques, cafes and food markets, all put together by the Rouse Company, one of the most prescient real-estate developers in the nation. Rouse built the ''new town'' of Columbia, Md., and a huge string of suburban shopping centers before discovering the potential of a certain kind of urban shopping area when it opened the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston in August 1976.

Harborplace is an attempt to bring the success of the Faneuil Hall markets to Baltimore. There are many similarities. The architect, Benjamin Thompson, is the same, and so is the general drift of the design. And the goal is certainly the same: to provide a mixture of food, merchandise and social experiences that will seem ''urban'' in a way that the mixture of food, merchandise and social experiences in a shopping mall on a freeway does not.

At this, Harborplace is a stunning success. It was Rouse's genius to realize that Baltimore, although not as fabled a center of young professionals as Boston, was still full of urbanites with no place to go. People come to Harborplace not only to shop but also to promenade and to see one another.

In retrospect, it is no surprise that Harborplace had seven million visitors in the first three months after its official opening last July, reaching in that period the visitor totals projected by Rouse for the entire year. The rents to merchants are high and the prices to consumers are hardly low, but there seems to be enough room for profit for everyone in this venture. Design Is Restrained

The place itself is handsome and understated, free of the exposed brick and gas lamps that are a feature of so many meccas for the new urbanites. The cuteness reflex seems to have been kept under control here, if not entirely eliminated.

Mr. Thompson's design of the two main pavilions that house all the shops and markets is admirably restrained. The pavilions are two stories high, with a lot of glass and with green metal shed roofs. There are tile floors and wonderful heavy-glass Holophane light sconces, and there is a dark green trim to add a sense of dignity. Many of the restaurants and shops have harbor views, and, by extraordinary luck, an immense spice warehouse nearby adds the smell of spices to the air.

The aisles in the pavilions containing the shops are quite narrow, a deliberate device to enhance the sense of this place as a little, crowded village, a world apart from the suburban mall. Graphics are strictly limited to Rouse-approved signs.

It is all rampant good taste. There is a bit more variety at Harborplace than at some similar projects and relatively fewer stores with cute names that are puns on the merchandise sold. But visitors can still buy stuffed animals at ''Embraceable Zoo'' and headgear at ''Hats in the Belfry.'' Order Is Built-In

There is a sense that the environment is controlled, very controlled. This, in the end, is the real problem with places such as this. Harborplace takes conventional aspects of the urban experience, the little cafes and the energetic markets overflowing with produce, and turns them into something tame. It makes them easier than they are in the real world, more contained, more measured.

Harborplace asserts that it is about spontaneity and variety, as real cities are; it is, in fact, about order and conformity. It is hard not to wonder how Rouse will do when and if the company gets a similar project going at the South Street Seaport along the East River in lower Manhattan. The proposed project, part of a $203 million development plan that includes an office building and hotel complex, has received approval from New York's Board of Estimate.

Baltimore and Boston were understandably so eager to get a place of markets and cafes and fashionable shops that they could happily accept so tame a version of the urban experience. New York's situation is very different. It overflows with the real thing, the kinds of stores and restaurants and markets and cafes that are the inspiration for such places as Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Harborplace.

Rouse may, of course, change its formula in New York, but if it does not, the city will be faced with the curious situation of an imitation of urban life amidst the real thing.

As for the Baltimore project, it is difficult to argue that Harborplace has not been a positive addition, if only because it has done so well at getting people downtown. Psychology is a large part of the battle to keep cities alive. Baltimore was never so bad as its detractors would have had us believe. It has a truly impressive stock of early 20th-century buildings and, at Mount Vernon Place, one of the finest downtown squares in the United States.

But neither is the city quite so extraordinary as its new boosters would tell us. It is not the nation's prettiest city, or its most livable or its most energetic. What it is is an old American city that has begun to look at itself as a fairly healthy being, and that alone is worthy of praise.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the National edition with the headline: BALTIMORE MARKETPLACE: AN URBAN SUCCESS; An Appraisal. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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