Visiting state capitols was not a goal of this trip, but we’ve come across eight so far.  The architectural quality of them, and the others I’ve seen, has been very good.  (The only truly embarrassing one being Oregon’s, which looks like a salt shaker designed by Albert Speer.)  But in every case, the quality of the capitol is overwhelmed by the mind-numbing banality of the state administration buildings which surround it.  They reflect the growth of state government in the mid-20th century, and the architecture  is always modernistic-pretentious, with lots of marble and “timeless” elevations.  Albany is obviously the most extreme, but it is not fun walking around any other state capital district either.  With the exception of Annapolis.

A beautiful, well-preserved, 18th-century state house, surrounded by a district which is still largely 18th- and 19th-century.  How can this be?  Where are all the soul-less boxes of bureaucrats?  Baltimore.  Maryland had the good sense to realize there’s no real reason why all the functions of state government have to be in the same neighborhood, and those large boxes were placed in a large city which was better able to accommodate their scale, both architecturally, and in terms of how many employees would have to work there.

The building itself is fine, the oldest continuously operating state house in the country, and was the temporary home of the US government in 1783-84.  George Washington resigned from the Army there, which is nicely reenacted by bronze statues (so much more satisfying than living reenacters).  

A beautiful central hall and dome

with an excellent sectional model to satisfy the architect-geeks.

The legislative chambers are accessible, and show their later remodelingand other period rooms are well-restored.

But the best thing about the capitol is how is situated, on top of a hill, providing a focus for views from all over the city.  

There’s a wonderful balance of the formal and the vernacular, what Krier calls the res publica and the res privata.  The state house is of central importance, but it is not the only important thing. Views down the main streets end in the harbor, as they should. There are grand houses (I’m not used to seeing Palladian villas in a city and not in the country) 

and small row houses and shops from the same period.

Some prominent locations are downright funky

and the buildings from different eras and of different scales are juxtaposed.

Some irregularity in siting is quite welcome, relieving the fairly uniform street walls. (I took this same photo 26 years ago.  It’s nice they got around to fixing the porch.)  

and there are just fine, elegant buildings from many periods.

and some quirks:  three steps, four materials.

Annapolis is this very historic town, full of historic buildings, yet it doesn’t feel precious, or forced (although some of the stores do).  I think this is because they’ve avoided the ye-olde self-consciousness.  It feels like an old city that has people living in it.  They haven’t tried to iron out the anachronisms – it is not a city frozen at one moment in time, but comfortable with many.

They were also smart (or lucky) enough to not have many bad 20th-century intruders.  (I don’t think it’s at all impossible for there to be excellent modern buildings in a context such as this – there are many examples in Europe and a few in this country.  It’s just highly unlikely.)   Annapolis avoided the modernist disrupters (of course, if you go a few miles to the edge of town, it’s just like the rest of America), and also the faux-historical imitators.  It avoided urban renewal, and apparently it avoided grand redevelopment schemes.  Being in such a coherent urban environment makes you realize how rare they are in this country, and how we managed to dodge a bullet a few times.  

In this age of media-cooption of direct experience, how truly can we see a place, without our understanding being overwhelmed by previously-seen portrayals of that place?  This obviously comes up with New York, and L.A., and many tourist destinations, but for me it also came up with Baltimore.  I had been there several times before, but to be honest, my deepest understanding of Baltimore has come from repeated viewings of Homicide and The Wire.  This preconception had its negative effects – I was worried about walking down an alley, expecting that ferocious black-and-white dog from the Homicide credits to hurl itself against the fence at me – but it also had positive effects.  It reinforced my interest in the fabric of the city, spending time walking through neighborhoods, rather than just seeking out the architectural highlights.  This coincides with Greta’s predispositions too, as she’d much rather people-watch and see day-to-day life than look at major monuments of architectural culture.

We were staying with our former student Neelab, who lives on the north side, a couple of miles from downtown, so our limited explorations fanned out from there.  (Plus my Wire-based geographic understanding led me to think that wandering around the North side was preferable to the East or West.)  We walked up through the Hampden neighborhood, a straightforward place which seems to be gentrifying at this moment, judging from the presence of a frites shop and other yuppie establishments.  Everyone understands the Baltimore rowhouse as the building block of the city, but what most struck me was the variety of designs, sizes, and styles within this simple type.  There were the obviously high-quality masonry houses,

the simple ones enlivened by coordinated color

the ones enlivened by the lack of coordination

the ones with classic porches instead of stoops

and the deeply idiosyncratic.

It was also cool to see traditions that we think of as primarily suburban – such as holiday decoration – running amok in the city:

While most blocks are uniformly rowhousing, there were also freestanding houses, semi-detached and narrow lot houses breaking it up:

and some unique houses, such as this one built by a local sculptor about 100 years ago.

And as with any good neighborhood fabric, there were the mixed use and commercial buildings, and local institutions mixed in with the housing.

We saw Johns Hopkins, a not especially unusual campus where the hegemony of academic Georgian is once again strongly in evidence.

We walked to the downtown to get a better sense of the range of neighborhoods, and made it to the Inner Harbor, the redevelopment that put the city on the tourist map, with the groundbreaking aquarium and the Inner Harbor.  The Aquarium took up a lot of our time, as Greta’s architecture-quota had maxed out and we needed to see more animals.  Designed in the 70s by Cambridge Seven, it was the first to offer extreme spatial variety, huge tanks, and what feels like an immersive experience.  The interior spaces and experience are great,

and the exterior conveys that this is a unique building, adding a focus to the waterfront.

To some extent, aquariums need to be black boxes, to control light and marine growth, but this aquarium connects the inside to the outside as much as possible. Overall, a very good building, though not quite up the Monterey Bay Aquarium, according to our family aquarium expert ( who has written a post about the aquarium qua aquarium and not architecture).

The Inner Harbor was one of the first “festival marketplace” developments by James Rouse, whose company was based in Baltimore.It’s a pretty convincing, nicely-scaled area which obviously opened up the view of the harbor, replacing the waterfront uses that were in decline.  It started a trend to bring suburbanites back into the city, by convincing them that it could be safe and fun.  We saw it on a November weekday afternoon, not prime tourist season, so it was clear that the spaces were scaled for the tourists who must throng it in the summer.  With the exception of a repurposed power plant with giant Hard Rock Cafe guitar on top, it doesn’t try too hard;  it all seems to be related to Baltimore somehow, and isn’t just the latest manifestation of a market-tested, globally-repeated, Disneyfied, ersatz urban branding extravaganza.  That is probably because it is now so old – a more recent development would look more like Vegas.

The issue of eras of building is important in another way in Baltimore.  If you zoom in on the picture above, you’ll notice that there aren’t really many new skyscrapers.  Baltimore has its share of crappy skyscrapers from the 60s and 70s, but very few from later decades.  I think this is a good thing.  Probably since it is a relative economic backwater, and not a global city, Baltimore has been spared the crush of banal behemoths that dominate so many other cities on the ascendant, such as Dallas, New York, Charlotte, etc.  These new skyscrapers may not be any worse than the older ones, but they are much bigger (in both height and floorplate) and they completely change the character of the downtown.  Cities such as Boston, which have preserved a lot of older buildings, can survive the onslaught with a semblance of balance, but newer cities, such as Seattle, become all too much of one era, and unfortunately not a very good one.  We’ve been visiting a lot of second and third-tier cities on this trip, and it strikes me that these cities, which are more embedded in the local rather than global economy, may be much better cities in which to live – reasonable housing costs, a sense of history, a slower pace.  The global cities are exciting and hip, but a city which has been spared the tsunami of global capital looking for a place to buy up real estate may provide a more grounded, balanced and satisfying life for a much wider range of residents.

Travelers are often obsessed with history.  Many major tourist attractions are historical sites, and we’ve noticed that people we’ve met on this trip often focus on historical minutiae.  But in planning out a truck-schooling curriculum for Greta this year, we ran into a problem:  history was Greta’s least-favorite subject.  I was taken aback – wasn’t it my responsibility, as a parent, to drag her on a tour of historical sites and monuments (everyone should see Gettysburg, dammit, even if I hadn’t)?  I asked her if there were any part of history she’d enjoyed, and she mentioned the history of the railroads.  Further discussion clarified that she was interested in seeing historical stuff, artifacts from the past that showed how things were made or economies and regions organized. She wasn’t at all interested in staring reverently at a field where a battle had taken place 150 years ago, and I realized, neither was I.  Being in a place where something happened long ago is kind of cool, but going out of your way to visit such a place didn’t make sense to either of us.  Our historical agenda derived from this insight;  we would visit historical places where there were substantial, tangible remnants of history (and preferably cool, Steampunk-looking ones with lots of gears and parts), and avoid places with people in period dress.

a carding machine in Lowell

Mill towns jumped to the top  of this list.  Our friend Dan prepared an exhaustive map of every mill town in New England he could find, and we set out to find a few.  North Adams was interesting, especially as a large mill had been converted to the Mass MOCA museum.  But clearly the main goal was to be Lowell National Historical Park, which preserves the mill district  where the industrial revolution really took hold in America.  It was an early planned, industrial city – a group of Boston investors scoped out possible sites for development, and settled on Lowell because of the drop in elevation of the Merrimack River, and the opportunity to build canals and waterways off it. 

Lowell also continued our trip theme of Cities Which Were Really Important 100 Years Ago, but Aren’t Anymore.  Except in this case it was 150 years.  At its peak Lowell had 55 major mills, and dozens of smaller ones.  Lowell took the cotton from the South and turned it  into cloth.  The original work force was New England farm girls, and a highly controlled, paternalistic system was put in place to ensure their respectability while living in the city.  Within a few decades the work force shifted to immigrants, and Lowell was the site of early labor organizing in this country.

The National Park Service has preserved much  of this infrastructure.  The historical area is an interesting mix of remnants of the waterways, a few preserved mill buildings, such as the Boott Mill complex, where you can walk through rooms with operating looms:

and other parts of the district, where privately owned sites sit vacant, or are available for redevelopment. 

In this way, Lowell is similar to our experience at Ebey’s landing National Historical Reserve on Whidbey Island, where 90% of the land is in private ownership, and the Park Service provides an overall organization and focus.

Once you get away from the renovated buildings, Lowell is pretty depressed and depressing.  Some mill buildings have been turned to other uses – such as a large medical clinic or loft housing for artists and yuppies – but let’s face it, the supply of old mill sites is much greater than any foreseeable demand for redevelopment.  It’s a story we’ve seen repeatedly on this trip, cities which peaked economically 100 years ago, and there hasn’t been much new investment.  I remember an Atlantic article a few years ago, where Bernard-Henri Levy visited Buffalo and said that this was inconceivable to a European, that one of the most important cities from 100 years ago could be allowed to decline so precipitously.  But the economy moves on, technologies and transportation systems change, and when a city has lost its primary economic raison d’être, what really can be done?  Architects tend to focus on the potential of the amazing building stock left behind, but this supply-side view ignores the lack of demand to fill those buildings up.

The next important mill town we visited was Paterson, New Jersey, located on the Falls of the Passaic River.  Although Paterson is a short trip from New York City, I had never been there before;  the average New Yorker just can’t conceive of voluntarily visiting New Jersey.  Paterson also didn’t have the best reputation – when I recently mentioned this visit to a friend, he was astonished that we drove through the center of Paterson without having our trailer stripped while waiting at a red light.  (This may be a slightly outdated view – we drove through the center of Paterson and it seemed like a depressed, but not necessarily dangerous place to me.)  

The Paterson mill district is even older than Lowell.  The initial group of developers included Alexander Hamilton and it was the first substantial manufacturing area in the country.  The mills centered around the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a 77-foot drop into a narrow canyon.  A very cool spot, and one that you might have seen in the Sopranos, as people sometimes get thrown off the bridge pictured here:

A really knowledgable historian who grew up in Paterson and now works for the NPS gave us the rundown on Paterson, which was surprisingly important – most of the early steam locomotives in the country were manufactured here, it was the center of the silk industry, an it was the site of the first Colt factory.  There are a few remaining mill buildings in the district near the Falls, as well as a museum (which we didn’t have time to visit, as we got stuck in horrific traffic jams in Paterson, and then missed a turn to the parking lot and had to circle around narrow streets with a trailer, and then ended up in front of an elementary school just as it let out).  Despite its gritty reputation, Paterson didn’t see as depressing as Lowell.  Perhaps we just saw a lot more street life, with a clearly vibrant immigrant population.  Perhaps it was because dreams of urban redevelopment don’t seem so unlikely when you’re within an hour of Manhattan and you have some great building stock.  We wished we had more time to investigate the city further, as the downtown has many remaining civic and cultural buildings from its era of prosperity.