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Baltimore Rebuilt Its Waterfront in 1980 to Save Its Image. Two Global Headquarters Are Now Built on the Same Ground.
Baltimore's Inner Harbor redevelopment began under Mayor Theodore McKeldin in the mid-1960s and culminated on July 2, 1980, when Harborplace opened under Mayor William Donald Schaefer -- a project the American Institute of Architects later called "one of the supreme achievements of large-scale urban design and development in U.S. history." It worked: more people visited the Inner Harbor in its first year than visited Disney World. What gets left out of the tourism story is what the reclaimed waterfront became underneath the tourists. Under Armour, founded in 1996 by a University of Maryland football player named Kevin Plank, built its global headquarters in 2002 in a converted soap factory at Tide Point, directly on that same waterfront. T. Rowe Price, a $1.6 trillion asset manager founded in Baltimore in 1937, broke ground on its new global headquarters at Harbor Point -- the same redeveloped shoreline -- for the firm's 85th anniversary. And Johns Hopkins, three miles inland, generates $19.4 billion a year for the city and supports one in every five Baltimore jobs. Baltimore's national image rarely mentions any of the four -- or the fifth: Camden Yards, twelve years into the same downtown revival, which quietly became the template nearly every MLB ballpark built since has copied.
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