The Harbor Point TIF is a Bad Deal for Baltimore

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First things first: friend of the blog and sane, decent Baltimorean Paul Gardner has launched a petition on Change.org to voice opposition to the Harbor Point TIF. Since you are also a sane, decent Baltimorean please click over and sign it now, before you continue reading.

Okay, now that that’s done we get to talk about why Harbor Point is a monumental screw-job for the city of Baltimore, being forced through by our mayor, SRB, who is now recognized nationwide as one of the worst mayors in America.

The harbor Point site. Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie.

The harbor Point site. Sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.

It’s really hard to write about a thing like Harbor Point, especially since it’s a months-old developing story, without either getting very long-winded and journalistic or very belligerent and angry (Guess which one we’re inclined towards). So what we’re going to do here is give some bullet points in no particular order:

  • The project is going forward as an Enterprise Zone development. Of course, there aren’t a lot of poor folks hanging around in Harbor East, so the developers had to piggyback off the poverty in Perkins Homes to get their project to go forward.

  • Once Harbor point is built, do you think folks from Perkins Homes will be welcome there? Do you? How about folks from… anywhere else? There is not one single unit of affordable housing planned for Harbor Point.

  • The last giant giant building that Baltimore taxpayers financed exclusively for outsiders is now completely fucking broke. It’s lost millions in each of the last 5 years and may end up sucking further millions from the city’s general fund in the near future.

  • The developer promises new jobs, but the big name companies being mentioned are already in Baltimore. Exelon and T Rowe whining that they want new buildings is a lot like the Oakland A’s whining that they want a new stadium.

  • Hey waitaminute… Didn’t Under Armour build itself a shiny new headquarters and create a bunch of jobs without stealing hundreds of millions from the treasury? (Hint: they did.)

  • Demand for office space and luxury condos isn’t that high. In our view, it hardly makes sense to build a ‘new downtown’ when the old one is half empty. What would the mayor have us do? Take everything between President and MLK and call it an Arts District?

  • Taxpayer financed municipal megaprojects always cost way more than expected. This one is no different.

  • The ‘current’ price tag to taxpayers for Harbor Point is $400,000,000. That’s about 4 times what it was supposed to be initially, and can only go up from there.

  • SRB wants to pay for $59,000,000 worth of parks for Exelon employees to enjoy while she’s shutting down rec centers in poor neighborhoods.

  • SRB still isn’t done bungling the development of the Superblock. One colossal fuck up at a time please, Madame Mayor.

  • Harbor Point Won’t Start Paying Property Taxes Until 2025. Ours are still due every quarter, though.

  • Let’s not forget the site is a chromium dump, and just might maybe give a bunch of people cancer and poison the harbor’s water even more. Construction of this type has never been attempted before.

  • Of course the developer and all their lawyers and associates maxed out on campaign contributions to SRB. OF COURSE THEY DID. Would you expect anything less?

  • But the City doesn’t want you to know that. In fact, they don’t want you to know anything. That’s why they violated the open meetings act on the Harbor Point deal.

  • It’s not as though the city doesn’t know how to embrace good development, and it’s not as though no private developers are willing to invest in non-waterfront areas. Look at what’s happening in Station North, at the Everyman Theater, or Camden Crossing.

  • This deal is not a foregone conclusion. They never broke ground on that shitty Wal Mart in Remington and there’s still time to stop this too.

    • Considering that city homeowners now pay a flush tax, a rain tax, and a 40% increase in water bills we don’t think giving away (at least) $400,000,000 to they mayor’s developer buddies is such a good idea. All this talk about Harbor Point being this generation’s Inner Harbor ring completely hollow, and Stephanie Rawlings Blake has zero credibility left.

    We signed Paul’s petition because we mean it: we won’t be supporting the mayor or any other candidates who support Harbor Point. In fact, we plan to donate time and money in the next election cycle to see them out of office.

    And if you think that signing an online petition is useless, consider what happened recently during a peaceful demonstration for Trayvon Martin: city hall was barricaded and cops were positioned on every corner. By the time you decide to show up to city hall to see a council meeting in person, you may find yourself stuck on the other side of Fayette.

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists @ Ottobar Tonight

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So Ted Leo’s playing the Ottobar tonight.

Not really sure what else to say about that. By now you should have formed your own opinion about Monsieur Leo. If you like his music, cool, we’ll see you there. If you don’t, just skip it I guess. If you still don’t have an opinion you should probably show up. If nothing else ol’ Theo Leo has a knack for getting a venue almost full but not quite sold out.

So since we haven’t got much to say here’s a YouTube video we found of Ted Talking to Ian Svenonius about what punk means to him. Worth a listen if you happen to be reading this on your lunch hour or whatever.

Plurals and Crimson Wave also play, and upstairs is everyone’s favorite Twofer Tuesdays. Maybe if we ask real nice they’ll even turn on the Oriole game.

David’s 1st & 10: Baltimore’s Best Sports Bar?

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Lately in Baltimore it’s been pretty tough to open a new bar or restaurant without drawing a lot of attention to yourself. As soon as your doors are open the fooderati are inside snapping up Instagrams of their dinners and Yelping their opinions all over the place. You might get a table visit from the chef or the manager… or maybe from the restaurant’s PR hack.

David’s 1st & 10 in Hampden is a different sort of place. It’s got a concept, sure. It’s a sports bar. But it doesn’t take that concept and try to add too much to it or completely reinvent it. It strives to do one thing really well, and that’s be a good place to drink beer and watch games. In that, it succeeds easily.

Now, there are some who would object. A lot of hardcore sports fans have a very set notion of what a sports bar should be- it should have massive TV’s and buy pay-per-view events and show UFC and have buckets of Miller Lite and wings and burgers and giant greasy nachos and pretty waitresses in short skirts. Memorabilia on the wall and Big Buck Hunter or Golden Tee in the corner.

We disagree with that. If we wanted to go watch a game at Hooters or Buffalo Wild Wings then by God we would. But putting down a Buffalo Wild Wings clone in Hampden would make about as much sense as opening up a Rocket to Venus in Owings Mills.

For a city that is a decently respectable sports town, with a Super Bowl champion football team and a playoff baseball team, Baltimore as a whole does lack something in the department of true dedicated sports bars. We would posit that this is because the city is so full of ‘neighborhood’ bars (which also show sports, of course) that the whole idea is lost on our collective consciousness. Why seek out a sports bar when you can just as easily go to Swallow at the Hollow or Frazier’s or Captain Larry’s and enjoy the game with other fans?

At any rate, the addition of a sports bar is welcome, even one that breaks slightly from tradition as David’s does. The thing that most sets it apart from places mentioned above is its menu… which is full of food that’s actually good. Sure it’s got burgers and wings, but it’s also got an actual chef who’s designed a right-sized menu with options like tomato-basil soup, mussels in white wine sauce, and farfalle ala vodka. With the number of high quality restaurants now open in Hampden the choices for dinner are many and the neighborhood’s tastes have evolved. We think David’s menu is pitch perfect: delicious but not overly ambitious. Decent beers are $4. If you’re complaining about that then go drink at home.

Another difference between David’s and a typical sports bar is the distinct lack of memorabilia in the atmosphere. First time visitors may be baffled by the hand-painted sign out front and the crudely done portraits of local sports legends inside. It certainly looks as if they’ve skimped on decoration, but we’re hoping that’s due to the fact that the place is brand-new and can serve as a blank canvas in the future- filling up over the years with neighborhood softball trophies, Pimlico silks, and (dare to hope) a replica 2013 Orioles World Series trophy.

The atmosphere is also unique in that it allows a great amount of daylight before sunset. David’s entire front is made up of large plate glass windows and offers more window square footage than any bar we’ve ever seen anywhere. That’s not a bad thing though. It’s a lot easier to see out than in, and being right near a major intersection it’s kind of nice to sit and watch Hampden go by when you’re tired of SportsCenter.

But the real key to atmosphere is the people inside a place, and on every visit we’ve made the crowd in David’s has been very relaxed and content. It’s not strictly necessary for a sports bar to be pumping constantly with testosterone and red-bull shots. With every return visit we like the place more and more, and to us it’s the kind of bar that makes you want to hold your tab open and stay through extra innings. Final Verdict: 3 1/2 Cartoon Birds.

4-birds-3 and a half

Baltimore Bike Party/ Human Host Movie in Bmore Tonight

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Sometimes when you’re a half-assed amateur blogger who writes about things on an as-they-happen basis there’s not much to do but tip your cap to a real professional staffed publication. You know, the kind that goes out and does real interviews and files and edits them and publishes them the day before the thing they’re about.

The folks over at the City Paper have already done a really good job of covering the two things we’re interested in in Baltimore tonight, so you might as well click over and read Jenna McLaughlin’s story on Baltimore Bike Party founder Tim Barnett.

From the article…

” And the crowds are growing each month. Over 1,700 showed up in June for the 1980s-themed ride, and hundreds more are expected this month.

One might expect a loud, flashy, muscle-bound dude to be behind this epic fitness parade, but Barnett is none of those things. He’s humble when he talks about his creation, but the undertones of his grand plans sneak into his speech: Tim Barnett wants to unite Baltimore and he doesn’t care how he does it. “It just happens that bikes are the vessel we do it on,” he says.” …continue reading.

This month’s route doesn’t appear to be published yet, but according to an announcement on its site, Bike Party will now begin at Pearlstone Park (at Mt. Royal Station on Mount Royal Avenue.) The group has grown too large for the Washington Monument and will leave from this location from now on. This month’s ride ends at Wyman Park Dell.

moon_phases3a

For the non-cyclists out there we’d suggest you read up on and then go to see The Human Host Movie. From City Paper’s Bret McCabe:

“Since 2002 [Mike] Apichella—best known to a segment of East Coast hardcore as the vocalist/de facto leader of the Charm City Suicides from 1997 to 2002—has appeared onstage as Human Host, the amorphous, genre-defying exploration of multimedia music performance.

Last year Apichella completed a five-year movie project inspired by his experience in Human Host. Titled The Human Host Movie, it’s an episodic, low-budget plunge into the sort of musical freakouts the band orchestrates onstage and records. Imagine Holy Mountain crossing streams with Don’t Look Back on the sort of budget that produced the Butthole Surfers’ VHS home movie-qua-concert film in 1985. It makes its local debut this week.” …continue reading.

Personally we have a fond remembrance of seeing Charm City Suicides/Human Host throughout the early 2000’s, and have nothing but nice things to say about Mike Apichella, So we’re going to make every effort to do both.

Parquet Courts, Sal Bando @ Ottobar Tonight

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Like most people over 30, the Chop has a very certain and specific taste in music. We know exactly what we like and recognize it when we hear it. Now, we could do what most of our parents’ generation does and just put it on cruise control and listen to Pavement and the Vaselines and Archers of Loaf from now until forever. But sometimes it’s nice to hear bands from this decade, you know?

Which is why we’re heading over to the Ottobar tonight to check out Parquet Courts.

PC’s Debut LP Light Up Gold was released in August 2012, with Pitchfork naming it one of 2013’s Overlooked Records. And it is easy to overlook: just by virtue of being the first record by some band from Brooklyn it’s enough to make most Baltimoreans shrug and look around for the next thing, but once you hear it it becomes a lot tougher to overlook. We’ve been spinning it about twice a week since we got our hands on it and there’s no sign of that pace slowing down anytime soon.

There are a few people here in Baltimore who remember seeing the White Stripes at the Davis Street Talking Head in about 2002 or whenever it was. We didn’t go to that show, but we kind of wish we had now that Jack White’s a superfamous rock star and all. It would be kind of cool to tell your kids ‘Oh yeah I saw Jack White in front of 30 people for like $6 and got drunk on Boh and pissed on his van in the alley.’

That’s the kind of band Parquet Courts is: the kind with limitless potential. It’s quite possible that after moving from Texas to NYC and switching from releasing music on cassette to vinyl/digital that they could follow a career arc similar to say, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Death Cab for Cutie.

If Parquet Courts was a stock we’d say buy. If they were a horse we’d say bet them to win. If they were a baseball prospect they’d be Manny Machado. That’s how highly we rate them. This is, after all, the first band we’ve heard in a long while that reminds us a little of the Minutemen.

Just a little.

But if you know how great the Minutemen were then you know that anyone who’s ever tried to imitate them has sooner or later hung their head in shame because ain’t nobody gonna do it like D Boon, Mike Watt and George Hurley.

Parquet Courts jam econo at the Ottobar tonight with fellow Brooklynites Woods and local talent Sal Bando and Small Apartments. Doors at 8, show at 9- all ages.