The future of Pimlico Race Course got a little clearer thisweek – at least theoretically – when approximately 100 of the track’s residentialneighbors gathered at the Mount Washington Conference Center on Wednesdayevening, Nov. 5, and heard planners say all the right things.
Up to a point.
Bill Cole, former head of the Baltimore Development Corp.,did most of the heavy verbal lifting, though he had help from Dalya Attar, TonyBridges and Sandy Rosenberg, all of whom represent the 41st Districtin the Maryland House of Delegates.
Considering that the prospects for the track and thePreakness Stakes were pretty bleak until the last couple of months, theplanners and speakers were all earnest and reassuring.
About most things.
Pending General Assembly approval, the Preakness will staywhere it’s been since 1873. That looked like a serious long-shot over the lastseveral years.
The creaky old clubhouse and stables will be torn down andrebuilt, and the track itself reconfigured. There will be a new public libraryon the premises, and space designed for athletic fields, community festivalsand events such as book fairs and a produce market.
There’s talk of a small hotel on the grounds, a grocerystore, an office building and homes. Sinai Hospital will develop a big swath ofthe property.
And the Preakness Stakes, which brings positive nationalattention and millions of dollars to Baltimore each spring, will stay where itis instead of moving to Laurel.
“From our first meeting,” Rosenberg said, tossing praise to Cole,“Bill made the analogy of Baltimore losing the Preakness to Baltimore losingthe Bullets.”
That’s the pro basketball Bullets, who once filled winternights at the place we used to call the Baltimore Civic Center (now Royal FarmsArena). They moved to Washington in 1973. It wasn’t as devastating as losingthe football Colts in ‘84, but it was pretty bad. It left a hole in themunicipal psyche.
Losing the Preakness would leave another hole.
“Bill gets it,” Rosenberg said. “He gets it.”
All of this sounds quite nice. It says the people fightingfor Pimlico understand the history and emotions involved, and not just theeconomics.
But it doesn’t cover everything.
There is still that area just below the track, along ParkHeights Avenue and Reisterstown Road all the way down to Park Circle, that hassuffered through half a century of municipal neglect.
Efforts have commenced to clean up the area, but we’retalking about a lot of years and a lot of damage, and a lot of troubles over alot of geography. It’s not going to be transformed overnight.
And until it is, we had some uplifting talk the other nightabout “community involvement.” That means making the Pimlico property welcomingto those on both sides of the track – a track that has been a physical andpsychological buffer between the middle-class neighborhoods to the northwest ofthe track and the impoverished areas below.
That’s an enigma still waiting to be addressed. How do youchange a buffer into a community gathering spot? That question has frustratedgenerations of Baltimoreans for roughly half a century, and it’s still waitingto be addressed.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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