The Great Creative Class Debate Continues

On April 23, two hundred leaders from Baltimore’s arts and civic communities gathered in the newly renovated Peabody Institute for a panel discussion of the role of arts in urban development. The focus of the day was twofold. First, participants considered how to create and sustain strong non-profit institutions, following the model of George Peabody, a mid-19th century financier who was America’s first great philanthropist. Peabody not only founded the Peabody Institute but also successfully challenged his friends to start the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Johns Hopkins University, and Walters Art Museum. Second, participants discussed how Baltimore could leverage its cultural strengths to build a broader economic development strategy that would enable it to compete successfully in the 21st century. The aim of the event was to start a conversation between a range of different sectors–public, private, non-profit–and institutions on both of these questions that would continue over the coming months and years.

Dr. William Brody, President of Johns Hopkins University, started the day by introducing Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, a graduate of Johns Hopkins and a primary supporter of the $26 million Peabody renovations. Then, Adam Gordon, Editor-in-chief of The Next American City, introduced and moderated a panel of local and national leaders on arts and economic development. To close, Mayor Martin O’Malley of Baltimore introduced his new “Creative Baltimore” plan, and audience members asked questions of O’Malley and the panel.

The below are selected excerpts of the event. Thanks to Peabody Director Robert Sirota, Cathy Cohen, Elizabeth Evitts, Joyce Ritchie, and the rest of the staff at the Peabody Institute for their hard work to make this panel possible.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg: We’re here to consider the role of arts in urban revitalization. Probably can’t have a better example of that than the Peabody campus. It’s right in the middle of Baltimore. It’s not quite as famous as Camden Yards, but it is getting there.

Arts and arts organizations seriously are a vital component of a city’s cultural life, particularly for the diverse communities that live there. They are also magnets for people that come from outside: tourists, of course, but also talented and ambitious dreamers.

Art defines our lives. Art pumps us up and makes us complete and gives us something to put a smile on our faces about, as well as gets the brain cells to keep going. When you talk about the pulse of the city, in many ways you really are talking about the artists that live there and the artists that work there. Art is one of the ways in which ethnic communities express themselves. Not everybody has had the kind of education that lets them write well. There are people who just instinctively have the ability to communicate in other ways. I think that great cities recognize this.

Art is about economics as well. I don’t think there’s any question why New York City’s tourism is the way it is. I was with a very well known clothes designer last night at dinner, and he had a friend coming to town who said, “Can you get me a hotel room?” He said both he and his secretary dialed for an hour before they finally found one room. New York City is full, and the reason the hotels are full, the reason the tourists come there, is because they want to see the museums, the performing arts centers–the tiny museums and not just the big ones. Art brings in millions and millions of dollars to any city. It transforms whole neighborhoods.

One of the great challenges we have is to bring artists into communities that are down on their heels and have the artists transform the communities–and that works–but as Mayor O’Malley knows, the great challenge is how do you keep it so the artists are able to live there as these neighborhoods become magnets and more and more people want to move in and drive the starving artists out. There’s no easy answer to that. What is clear is that culture changes neighborhoods, and that all of these things take money to do. There’s no question the arts have to be supported. They have to be supported by private philanthropy as well as public philanthropy. Public philanthropy is great, but it’s private philanthropy that really lets people be totally creative. If we didn’t have private philanthropy we’d be back in the old masters days. We certainly never would have had something as blasphemous as impressionism. Medicine–the same thing is true: you would never try anything new because the public’s money can’t do that.

I think the stakes are very high. If you falter in your community or in your city and you walk away from the arts, it can be generations before you can turn that around. Once it becomes unfashionable to go someplace it stays unfashionable for a long time. It is also a very competitive world. Mayor O’Malley has got to get people to move here; Mayor Bloomberg’s got to get people to move to New York. People have choices today that they never had before.

Adam Gordon: Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg for that wonderful talk. I am a recovering Baltimorean. Well, I only lived here for three years, which is about twenty or so years short of what it takes to actually call yourself a Baltimorean. I found living here both exhilarating and frustrating. Exhilarating–because of the wonderful neighborhoods with great local institutions like Pete’s Grille and the Cross Street Market, the ability to live in a smaller city but still have access to New York and Washington, and the phenomenal cultural opportunities. Frustrating–because of the racial divisions, neighborhood divisions, and divisions between the business, non-profit, and government communities. My conclusion was that those “Greatest City in America” benches were not a stretch, in terms of Baltimore’s potential, but a real stretch in terms of Baltimore’s reality.

Bob, you’ve just put $26.8 million into Mt. Vernon [Baltimore’s main cultural district, just north of downtown] and into the Peabody. What are you going to do to leverage that investment and make it into a prime force in bringing economic development to Baltimore?

Dr. Robert Sirota, President of the Peabody Institute: I want to read some figures to you because I think we need to understand that capital investment is a beginning, but the kind of economic development that the arts bring to great cities like Baltimore is no longer peripheral. It’s absolutely central to the economic growth and health of the city. Capital Investment in downtown Baltimore in 2003 was $2.5 billion with approximately 110 projects in various stages. The largest portion of this, 35 percent, was driven by education and cultural institutions.

Since 1997, some 1,150 new housing units were created downtown–[many] in converted office buildings, like The Standard–and [they] are leasing for higher than anticipated rents to what we might call Creative Class types.

Non-profit employment in Maryland has grown three times faster than for-profit employment in the last ten years. In 2003 alone, non-profits employed more than 80,000 people and paid them some $3,245,000,000 dollars. This accounts for over 21 percent of city employment. Last year employment on the whole dropped 2.78 percent in Baltimore. Non-profit employment in Baltimore rose 8.5 percent.

The non-profit sector has grown tremendously and has grown extraordinarily in relation to the entire economy. We are no longer a kind of a frill. We are central to the growth of the economy of this great city. We need to look at ways that we can leverage that. We need to find ways in which non-profits are encouraged to come to this city and move into this city, both big and small, in the same way one would encourage large corporations to come in or banking firms or anything else.

Gordon: A lot of people sometimes say that Baltimore is the kind of city where it’s hard to get people from different sectors to communicate. How do you get all the sectors together to coordinate a strategy for the economic development of the city? Jay Brodie, President of the Baltimore Development Corporation: I’m a very down-to-Earth architect/planner person, so I tend to think the answer in part lies in finding mutually interesting and challenging physical developments around which people can work. I’ll give you some examples. Seven years ago, I sat down with Bob Sirota, Gary Vikan [of the Walters Art Museum], Dennis Fiori [of the Maryland Historical Society], and Connie Caplan [of The Time Group] and talked about coming out from the fortresses of the 1960s, which they had each inherited, and trying to see what physical improvements could be made in the Mt. Vernon area that would send a different message to the public.

The work has not only resulted in the kind of individual physical improvements that you see here, but other things that are lessons to the future: streetscapes, sidewalks that you don’t trip over and that could be attractive, places where you can sit. So we haven’t surrendered as we did for a while in the ‘60s [when we said] we’re not doing bus shelters because homeless people might inhabit them. That’s giving up to our worst tendencies rather than playing to our best tendencies. We should be well beyond that.

And then there’s one bigger idea. And this is the New Testament that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class. There’s an Old Testament, a gentleman who’s not read much anymore, but had something wonderful to say along these lines. His name was Lewis Mumford. I’m going to give you a quote to close: “The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant heap. But it is also… man’s greatest work of art.” That’s something to which we could aspire.

Gordon: Where should Baltimore be looking to for models? Which cities are doing the best job of using the arts as an economic driver?

Ellen Lovell, President of Marlboro College and former director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in the Clinton Administration: Well first I want to comment that from what I’ve seen and heard, I think Baltimore is just ahead of the curve.

In 2000, the New England Council–think of that as a regional chamber of commerce–and the New England Foundation for the Arts published the first comprehensive study on the creative sector, conducted by a very independent and skeptical economic development firm. It wasn’t just people looking for things they wanted to prove.

The findings: the creative cluster employs 3.5 percent of the workforce in New England… That’s more than software, for which New England’s very well-known, and more than medical technology. The creative sector is growing faster at 14 percent than the rest of the economy at 8 percent. And the creative sector brings in outside revenues: $6.6 billion in cultural tourism alone.

Out of all this came a blueprint for action. It’s being pushed now by their Creative Economy Council, which is sponsored by the Boston Branch of the Federal Reserve. That’s some clout.

What’s most important aside from the action steps that are coming out of it, I think, is this broad definition of the sector. Thinking like a sector has to come before changing policies that then encourage the creative sector, followed by investment to support the sector.

Gordon: How do all [large cultural institutions and small neighborhood arts groups] fit together into a coordinated arts strategy for the city?

Randi Vega, Director of Cultural Affairs in the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts: Nobody could doubt the effect that Baltimore Clayworks is having in their community of Mount Washington and at Mondawmin Mall. Nobody could question the effect that Theatre Project is having on their community and on the city as a whole. Baltimore is made up of these neighborhoods where there are arts organizations that are working everyday with the folks who actually make up the people in Baltimore.

We need to bring together the larger institutions–the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters, Peabody, the institutions that are famous, that people know about–with our smaller organizations to find out how they can be helpful to each other. How can the Peabody reach into the community through these smaller organizations? How can the resources that the Peabody has be used in the community by the smaller active organizations on the ground?

The arts are making the communities healthier, better places for people to live. That’s what attracts people into Baltimore. Mayor Bloomberg mentioned gentrification, which is something that people in the neighborhoods are concerned about. If all these rich people move back into Baltimore, where am I going to go? Tom Wilcox said this morning that we should be so lucky to have that problem. But there’s an answer to that. If we work together we can find that answer so that our artists can live side by side with neighborhood people and new people coming into the communities.

Sirota: I think the vibrancy of this city and the vibrancy of any city is absolutely dependent upon the role that the independent artists and the neighborhood organizations play. Peabody has for many years been susceptible to charges of elitism, but that was not George Peabody’s original charge. It was to create an institution where all of the people of Baltimore were served, and all were welcome, and they [all] were participants in this idea of civitas, this idea of a great city.

The original picture of George Peabody inaugurating in 1866 the first building at Peabody includes a mob of 10,000 school children. They emptied the schools to experience this. We lost our way as institutions years ago, and we need your help in finding it back. We don’t want to be considered something else; we want to be part of that process. We want to participate in the political and social fabric of the city.

Gordon: The competition for people and businesses on the East Coast is fierce. Is it possible for Baltimore to compete in this environment and attract the businesses and people it needs to break the cycle of poverty and violence?

Tom Wilcox, President of the Baltimore Community Foundation: The answer to me is very clear. That’s already started. Of late, scores are up, graduation rates are up, dropout rates are down. People are staying in schools, and innovation is occurring in schools. We have more and more people coming to Baltimore through the Collegetown Network because it’s got so much to offer. The opportunity for the young, the opportunity for the many that Baltimore represents has begun.

We are rapidly becoming a region of choice and a region of opportunity. We have to take that to scale. I would posit that the tipping point is occurring this week, it’s occurring this year. I was born in and grew up in the Big Apple, I lived in Boston and San Francisco and Florence and Switzerland, and I have not found a more vital place than Baltimore. The only people who don’t believe it are Baltimoreans as far as I can see.

Gordon: Mayor Martin O’Malley of course needs no introduction to this audience, but perhaps you’ll forgive me, Bob, for being the second speaker today to mention an Irish rock band [O’Malley’s March, a Celtic rock band headed by the Mayor] in this great hall of classical music.

Sirota: We are not elitist here!

Gordon: I think the enthusiasm that I’ve seen the Mayor demonstrate on guitar at various concerts is very much a reflection of his greater enthusiasm for the city of Baltimore.

Mayor O’Malley: Thank you very much. C’mon admit it. You all wanted to be warm in your applause just so I wouldn’t feel like you love me less than you love Bloomberg.

We suffer from I think a pathological modesty. Only in Baltimore would you be leading the nation in the rate of reduction of violent crime four years in a row. Your test scores are going up every year in your public schools with your first and second graders going above the national average in reading and in math for the first time in 30 years. Average sales price of your homes has gone from $63,000 to $123,000. You are sitting in one of the most beautiful squares that any city could possibly have, across from the largest bequest of private art that was ever given to any people in any city in America. And we’re all asking ourselves, “What’s wrong with Baltimore?”

We are simmering with creativity. Our medical research institutions are world-renowned. In your very city could come the cure for diseases that threaten right now to wipe out an entire continent. That, too, is art. That, too, is creativity. We make our city welcoming not with stadiums or by subsidizing corporate relocations; in fact we are making a pretty conscious move away from that.

What we are trying to do is to invest in those amenities of place that attract creative people. Those amenities of place that are unique to Baltimore, that create the climate that will allow the Peabody to attract the sort of students you want.

Over the years we’ve been doing a number of things [to support the arts]. We raised over $1.3 million and put music programs back into 54 of our schools. No accident that the grades are going up when the music and the arts are returning to class.

We’ve committed to increasing the grants to small community arts organizations; not by as much as we want, but we are increasing it. We’re recognizing that stable arts organizations can be anchors to communities. I’ve always believed that. I’m a frustrated artist myself. You talk about being a recovering lawyer, but at heart, I’m a mediocre folk singer in a rock band.

There is still an enormous amount of potential that has to be tapped. Creative Baltimore is an effort that we’re spearheading to try to reach out and to try to categorize, catalog, better convene, better connect, and better leverage all of the various arts institutions… Here are some of the ideas that we’re pushing forward.

1. We want to create an outdoor Baltimore, if you will. Not only improving and expanding green spaces, but linking them across neighborhoods, promoting them. How many of you have even been to the Gwynns Falls Trail? How many of you went to the trout release this weekend in Leakin Park? I did that one.

2. Creating an up-to-date Baltimore as a post-industrial city. There are a lot of things that we can do with regard to planning, zoning, and other classifications to bring them closer to current needs and trends.

3. We need to create a post-collegiate Baltimore, if you will. We need to do a better job of lending ourselves to attracting and retaining more of our college students and letting them know what’s here. There are a lot of kids who come here to college for four years, and yet they never truly experience Baltimore.

Entrepreneurial Baltimore is also a creative Baltimore. Entrepreneur Magazine moved our city in one year’s time from 30th to 12th because of the new jobs being created by these small firms. Not just being created, but surviving beyond five years and actually growing. That’s the engine, I believe, that we are fast becoming as a city. Two-thirds of all new jobs in America are created by small business. We can become that destination.

Audience member: I frequently go past the juvenile detention center between places in town, and it distresses me enormously to see the size of that building. How do we get [incarcerated youths] to feel the joy of music and the arts to replace the pain that they are suffering through their whole lives?

Sirota: The big challenge in this city is that a lot of the social service safety net available to people has been replaced by the penal system. I think I can speak for a lot of the major cultural institutions here that we stand ready to do our part in reforming the educational system not just for those students who are mainstream. Some of our students do go into the jails and work in the jails already, but we need a structure around a lot of these small acts of personal dedication.

Vega: I just wanted to make the point that the arts cannot cure all social ills. But I think we all recognize that the arts can make a difference and in many cases can make a big difference. That’s where we need to concentrate our efforts.

Audience Member: The city’s 60 percent African-American, and this room is virtually all white. I’ve watched for decades the collapse of African-American cultural organization after cultural organization–being starved for resources while resources pour into Mount Vernon and into white institutions. I would just like to know how the panel thinks we can shift the lion’s share of wealth and control into the African-American community so we never have an almost all-white room like this again.

Wilcox: Baltimore does need, it’s quite clear to me, some long and hard discussions on race. Who better to initiate that conversation than people from the creative class right here?