Places
I have become keenly aware of how there are certain places you can never be again.
Change is constant in life, and the physical spaces we inhabit seem to exhibit the most permanent changes possible. Not that a space can’t change and then change again later on, but that, as a culture, we demolish or reconfigure old buildings and landscapes when we (collectively) feel like they’ve reached their useful life, or when we feel we can improve them, only to lose what those spaces were - forever. The sheer scale and cost of those sorts of changes make them irreversible. There’s no undo button available. Once they are gone, they’re gone for good.
Other experiences in life can be recreated, or at least emulated. If you sell an old, beloved car, there’s always the option to try to find another one to buy out there. Recorded music is available forever. I still play mostly retro video games from my youth. You can’t visit a demolished building, though.
I bring this all up because I’ve been thinking about Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
For some reason, the vibe of that place from the school trip visit all the way back in 1999 still sticks with me. I may cringe at what I said or what happened there, but the memory of just existing in that space is still one of the most inviting daydreams. The expanse of brick on that wide open waterfront, like someone created the best version of Boston’s City Hall Plaza, except in the Seaport. The Harborplace mall, a pair of gloriously Postmodern structures that seemed like palaces. The neon of the Hard Rock at the other end. The USS Constellation just hanging out there. It was a place I wished I had more time to explore.
I did eventually explore it more, but in very different circumstances. I had a conference in Baltimore as part of my internship the year after I graduated college, and we ate lunch there a couple of times as part of it. Somehow, at that point, the school trip had faded from memory somewhat, and while it seemed familiar, it didn’t have the pangs of nostalgia. Likewise several years later when I had seats for IndyCar right next to Harborplace for the Grand Prix. The feelings came back greater then, but they were still dulled by the giddiness of my immersion in my favorite racing series.
Now, though, I want to be back there.
While the Baltimore Inner Harbor is still there, and still broadly looks the same, it’s not the same as it was. I haven’t been back in a decade, but I’ve read the news articles. Harborplace is closed, as far as I know, and slated for redevelopment. The Hard Rock became something else entirely. The Fuddruckers that we ate at disappeared long ago.
What becomes disappointing, even troubling, to me, is the complete lack of documentation of much of this. Archiving is a major thing nowadays. Video game enthusiasts rightfully fight for the preservation of games that would otherwise vanish into the ether, and there are entire communities online dedicated to finding and preserving video and audio that the world assumes to be lost. There’s never been that kind of effort for buildings, though. You would think, at a bare minimum, that you’d see more mall maps or building directories around, but even those are pretty scarce. There’s plenty of photos of Harborplace and the Hard Rock, but there is nothing, not even a low res photo, left of Fuddruckers out there. It’s completely undocumented.
It’s not like a photo gallery of these places would actually transport me back in time to that experience (if I could, I’d tell my younger self to order a hamburger and actually try to talk to “Meredith”), but they’d satisfy that itching to match the vibe. Like how a song that reminds you of a specific time in your life can build up that tension in your spine and then release it as an uncomfortable but satisfying chill. I want those images to be there to give that to me, because the spaces and the atmosphere were incredible, and so I can immerse myself in them without necessarily bringing up the awkward moments in my mind. Images and memories of the people and moments make me cringe, images and memories of the place make me drift away.
I also want this because, try as I might, I can’t express those feelings and emotions any better anywhere else. I’ve tried drawing those places but both my memory and my artistic skills fail me. I want the images to help that, to give me the starting point to bring what’s in my head out. Maybe the correct place for these thoughts is staring me in the face and I need to write them out, but that’s for another time.
There’s a bigger picture I think about as well. In Boston, many of the old Postmodern palaces that I grew up going to have changed or been eradicated. CambridgeSide Galleria, just behind 200 Clarendon and City Hall as one of my favorite buildings in the metro area, is getting a major redo that, while admittedly well done, is taking out a chunk of the elaborate décor that I grew to love. Prudential Center retains much of it but it’s been bastardized over the years. Copley Place has been completely destroyed, the welcoming and impressive fountain and colored marble replaced with sterile white everything. The old stuff might have been tacky but you can’t say the new stuff is tasteful because it has no taste at all. It was once a welcoming place to spend time in, now it feels like it’s rushing you through it, like the tunnel that connects it to Back Bay Station. Only the Longwood Galleria, with its garishly 1990s signage, still remains intact, but the clock has to be ticking on it.
Postmodernism is at the point, architecturally, of being like a used car. In the late 1970s and early 80s, 1960s muscle cars were dinosaurs, relics of a past no one wanted, until time rendered them desirable classics. That has happened (somewhat) with Brutalism, but that time has not yet come for Postmodernism. Instead, such buildings are looked at as obstacles to progress. Why keep these ostentatious wastes of land when something modern and urbanist can be built?
Because these places ruled. All the detail and ornamentation made a kid want to explore, find out what was around the next corner. The food courts were wide open and bustling with fancy chairs and neon signage. In the daytime, skylights let the colors shine in the sun. In the nighttime, the lighting emulated regal halls. Christmastime turned them into the physical form of the David Foster version of Carol of the Bells, full of drama and sparkle. It didn’t matter that I had no use for most of the stores beyond Kay-Bee and Software Etc., just being there was enough to bring warmth, joy, and wonder.
Those places don’t exist anymore, and will never exist again. That sucks.
Maybe I’m the only one who cares, though, and that might be why it hurts so much, and why I’m so desperate to see these things preserved. I know my son will ultimately get the same feelings for the places we will bring him over the coming years, and those places will also be temporary. He, at some point, will come to the awareness that things he will have seen and places he will have been will no longer exist, and he will not have an opportunity to experience them again. But he also lives in a new age, where documenting the world around us is much easier and the work of doing so is distributed amongst the masses. Perhaps he’ll be more able to relive those memories than I am, and more accurately too. For me, however, it will be a ceaseless hunt through Flickr and YouTube to find the rare glimpses of those places as they were when they made an impact on a younger me.
For now, then, the Inner Harbor as it was is less a true photo than an impressionistic mass of color and atmosphere. Like an AI image generator that can get the geography broadly correct but the fine details wrong. I will always remember getting my caricature done, but not where in Harborplace it was, or that we ate at the second level of Fuddruckers, but not knowing what it actually looked like, beyond the Sonic the Fighters machine beneath us. A hazy dream that I wish I could grasp onto, but will never be able to. A place I will never be again. A place no one will ever be again.