David A. Wallace
"David A. Wallace, FAICP, AIA, PP" (1917 – July 19, 2004) was an influential urban planner and architect who founded the firm of Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) with Ian McHarg.
In a career that spanned the second half of the 20th Century, David A. Wallace contributed significantly to the fields of planning and urban design as a professional, as a builder of communities, and as a teacher. His accomplishments in planning serve as models for the profession. Beginning in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1953, under Mayor Joseph S. Clark, Wallace led a citywide urban redevelopment evaluation that resulted in the "Central Urban Renewal Area Report" (CURA). In it he established a new strategy for overall redevelopment that targeted catalytic actions to strengthen communities and downtown. CURA became a model for several other cities, notably Baltimore, Maryland.
In 1957, Wallace moved to the City of Baltimore, in Maryland and headed a team to prepare a plan for the city's ailing central business district, which had not had any major skyscrapers or substantial new construction since the end of the "Roaring 20's". Responding to the need for immediate action, the team designed the 22-acre (89,000 m2) Charles Center, a 33-acre mixed-use project that started the revitalization. Approved by the Baltimore City voters in a bond issue request for $25 million in the municipal elections of November 1958, the concept was strongly supported by two different strong mayors of the city from both political parties: Democrat (from Baltimore's long-standing political dominating machine) Thomas L. J. D'Alesandro, Jr. (1947-1959) and Republican (long a city out-voted minority) Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, (1943-1947 and 1963-1967). Along with business, commercial and other civic leaders in the Greater Baltimore Committee and the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce. Praised by Jane Jacobs in the journal "Architectural Forum" as the "New Heart for Downtown Baltimore", Charles Center also set the stage for Baltimore's later even more famous "Inner Harbor". This re-development of its old waterfront district at Pratt and Light Streets along the former "Basin" at the head of the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River and the Baltimore Harbor, which had gotten shallower over the decades with outdated municipal piers with the larger cargo ships being unable to turn around or use the new containers for bulk cargo that were then coming into vogue. Some newer port facilities had already moved further southeast to the lower river (such as the "Dundalk Marine Terminal" and later "Sea-Girt Terminal") with the new-style of roll-on and roll-off handling of automobiles and large overhead cranes to load and unload ever more larger ships, moored to the side of the docks like cars doing "parallel parking", replacing the old type of "break-cargo", handled by rope nets and using large numbers of stevedores and longshoremen.
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