Charles Center

Charles Center City Center
Neighborhood
Looking up from the Charles Center subway station.
Country	United States
State	Maryland
City	Baltimore
District	Central

Charles Center is a large-scale urban redevelopment project in central Baltimore's downtown business district of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beginning in 1954, a group called the "Committee for Downtown" promoted a master plan for arresting the commercial decline of central Baltimore. In 1955, the "Greater Baltimore Committee", headed by banker and developer James W. Rouse, joined the effort. A plan was developed by noted American urban planner and architect David A. Wallace, (1917−2004), strongly supported by Mayors Thomas L. J. D'Alesandro, Jr. (1947−1959) and Theodore R. McKeldin, (1943−1947 and 1963−1967) and many in their administrations, which formed the basis of a $25 million bond issue voted on by the citizens of Baltimore City in during the municipal elections in November 1958. The architects' view of the overall Charles Center Redevelopment Plan with the conceptions of possible buildings, lay-out and plan that was publicized to the voters that spring and summer before, only slightly resembles the actual buildings and designs that later were really constructed by the mid-1970s.

The plan was unusual for its time in not pursuing a "clean-slate" site, but rather incorporating existing structures. The 33 acres (13 ha) site includes three public plazas, (Charles, Center, and Hopkins) designed by RTKL, connected by walkways, staircases and pedestrian bridges. The plazas cover several multi-level underground parking garages known originally as "Down Under". In the late 1970s Rouse's Inner Harbor project extended the redevelopment southward to Baltimore Harbor and the northern shore of the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River and was even later in the late 1980s to include the Pratt Street Power Plant on Pier 4 along East Pratt Street and moving north up into Market Place (site of former "Centre Market" with its three adjacent wholesale produce, fish and retail/dry goods market buildings) along the west bank of the Jones Falls stream, with a development with two different phases/developers as "The Brokerage" and later renamed "Power Plant Live!" .