As Robert C. “Bob” Embry leaves his role as president of the Abell Foundation, it is time to reflect on his remarkable role in Baltimore and its neighborhoods.
Before his days at the Abell Foundation, Embry was the city’s housing commissioner (1967 to 1977) while also controlling the quasi-public downtown redevelopment agency, Charles Center Inner Harbor Management.
Few realized the power Embry held. Embry could be quiet and self-effacing, even aloof, all while flexing muscle over the city of Baltimore. As a Harvard-trained lawyer, he also knew how things really work — and can work — in an aging city.
He often let others take the credit while he pulled strings and got the job done. He worked with his deputy, M. Jay Brodie and wisely let Mayor William Donald Schaefer take all the bows and the credit.
Schaefer was dazzlingly adept at putting on a show to open Embry’s projects — once even dressing in a bathing suit costumes to great fanfare.
To the public, it all appeared seamless as Baltimore emerged from its post-World War II paralysis. While the old downtown was patched up, the Inner Harbor rose to new heights, flying in the face of critics and doubters who said it would forever belong to the city’s homeless residents.
(It did not hurt that President Lyndon B. Johnson funded the early harbor reconstruction with a generous supply of federal funds, however.)
Embry was a connoisseur of bold and risk-taking architecture. He sought out Moshe Safdie, the visionary Israeli-Canadian-American architect, to create a plan for Coldspring Newtown on the edge of the Jones Falls Valley near the Cylburn Arboretum.
He took risks to get it built — or mostly built. Some thought it a wacky idea, but it was innovative.
About the same time Embry backed the then-startling idea of urban homesteading, better known as the “dollar house” concept. He found the money (often federal) to fund his plan and, by 1974 allowed a small band of people to reclaim the Stirling Street houses in the Oldtown Urban Renewal District.
Urban homesteading — or buying a vacant house for a token $1 — was an enticing concept, but fraught with practical pitfalls. The cost of total custom renovation was expensive and required a reliable army of commercial rebuilders, plumbers, roofers and electricians. The onus fell to schoolteachers and social workers, who were often acting as their own general contractors.
After Stirling Street, Embry greenlit concentrated homesteading projects in other pockets of Baltimore. Soon, we had Otterbein and Barre Circle, and all of a sudden, a sizable swatch of downtown Baltimore was on the rise.
There were disappointments, too. Despite the care and money put into the rebuild and design at the Oldtown Mall (a portion of Gay Street in Northeast Baltimore), it failed not long after this historic shopping street reopened. The urban pedestrian mall’s business collapse may have been linked to the 320,000 persons who have left Baltimore since 1970.
Embry‘s attention wasn’t focused solely on housing, however. One Monday night, after the City Council met, I ran into him as he sat alone at a table at the old Horn & Horn restaurant on East Baltimore Street.
He called me over to tell me that the city (meaning he and his close associates) were going to reopen and run the old Morris A. Mechanic Theatre. This was a stretch — after all, the housing department would now control a commercial theater under the authority that it was squarely in an urban renewal district.
The closure of the Mechanic, only a few years after its 1967 gala opening, was a real bummer for downtown Baltimore. The Mechanic’s locked doors seemed to say the city was dying.
Embry, who was also a powerful string puller behind the old Baltimore City Fair, made sure the Mechanic reopened and succeeded. Some 22,000 persons backed the reopening plan by paying for season subscriptions. Within a few years lines of theater patrons snaked around the block to buy tickets for “A Chorus Line,” and Carol Channing and Vincent Price were headlining shows downtown.
He also headed a public housing agency, ensuring apartments were maintained.
Embry was Baltimore’s civic architecture czar. He gave us the National Aquarium as designed by Peter Chermayeff of Cambridge Seven Associates, as well as the Columbus Center, just to the east along Pratt Street.
As head of the Abell Foundation, Embry continued to influence Baltimore’s architecture. By 2012, a new John and Francis Angelos University of Baltimore School of Law at Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue, was complete. The foundation sponsored a design competition and paid $50,000 each to to three finalist designers; the winner was a firm from Stuttgart, Germany. The results made a bold statement.
Embry saw Baltimore’s potential and worked to make the best of it.
Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jacques.kelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.