Dan Taylor’s long runs through Baltimore made him a believer.

The Midwesterner moved to Upper Fells Point soon after graduating in 2007 from the University of Michigan, initially took a job in Aberdeen and started training for a marathon.

He pounded the pavement across neighborhoods that were thriving — and neighborhoods that once thrived. Each step convinced him of Baltimore’s potential.

That conviction is strong as ever, he says, but if there was ever someone with a reason to dismiss the city as stuck in place, it’s Taylor. For the past decade, he has been tasked with solving one of Baltimore’s trickiest development challenges: the Superblock.

The ambitious West Baltimore redevelopment project officially kicked off in 2003 and endured a decade’s worth of delays before finally fizzling out. Under Taylor’s watch, three more attempts to redevelop the area failed. This year, he and his team are gearing up for a fourth try.

Taylor joined the Baltimore Development Corp., or BDC, in 2013, later becoming its vice president of business and neighborhood development. The BDC doesn’t directly develop projects, instead finding and supporting developers for city-owned properties. Taylor and his team have had success redeveloping some West Baltimore properties, but the Superblock has stuck around as his trickiest challenge.

Despite its name, the Superblock isn’t a contiguous property on a single block. It is made up of more than two dozen city-owned parcels across two blocks. The boundaries of the Superblock have changed since the term was first used about three decades ago, when Taylor was a middle schooler in Ann Arbor.

This area along Howard Street was once the city’s marquee shopping district, with large department stores. White flight and suburban shopping malls siphoned away the area’s shoppers, prompting store closures, but smaller vendors and niche shops took their place. They were often operated by immigrants and served Black shoppers.

Under an ambitious redevelopment plan, the city displaced those businesses and acquired the property for the Superblock. But the Superblock never came.

RFP on repeat

By the time Taylor got hired at the BDC, the properties had been sitting vacant for years and deteriorating. But Taylor still sees the district’s unique charm and architecture.

For years, he has led tours throughout the area, pointing out successful redevelopments surrounding the Superblock, some of which were shepherded by his team.

Initially, Taylor said he couldn’t do anything about the Superblock, because the property was tangled up in litigation between the city and a developer.

When that litigation ended in 2015, Taylor said the BDC immediately solicited ideas from developers, a formal process called a “Request For Proposals,” or RFP. Rather than take on the entire Superblock, prospective developers could submit ideas for one or multiple parcels.

Despite a flurry of public interest, Taylor said there wasn’t much response from developers.

“A developer did not want to take a risk of being the only redeveloped building on an island of vacancy,” Taylor said. “It was too big of a risk for most developers.”

In 2017, there was a second RFP. A proposal for a skilled nursing facility was selected, Taylor said, but then that deal fell through.

For their third attempt in 2019, Taylor said they bisected the Superblock into two separate RFPs. A smaller proposed development on the south side of the Superblock couldn’t get off the ground, but for years it appeared that a more ambitious project on the north side was on the cusp. Called the Compass, it was a multiuse project and involved several developers.

Last year, the BDC gave them an ultimatum: Show us your financing, or we’re canceling the deal.

The BDC terminated the relationship in October. Taylor and his team are now preparing a fourth RFP.

There are macro-level challenges to redeveloping the Superblock, such as high construction costs and relatively high interest rates. And there are micro-level challenges, like the negative perception of Baltimore and the open-air drug markets that have operated on the west side of downtown.

Then there are the buildings themselves.

The largest is the Brager-Gutman building, at the corner of West Lexington Street and Park Avenue. Once a bustling department store, the vacant building is an imposing and historic gem, Taylor said. It is also a large, oddly shaped space, difficult to convert for a modern use.

Solving the puzzle

Taylor is the spiritual successor to Dave Stein, who was working at the Downtown Partnership in the mid-1990s, during the mayoral administration of Kurt Schmoke. That’s when the term “Superblock” was first used, Stein said in a phone interview.

Outreach to the community and stakeholders culminated in a 1996 plan, Stein said. The Weinberg Foundation owned several large properties in the area, Stein said, and they hired him to quarterback a more expansive plan for what was possible in the area.

Eventually, the Superblock came to mean an area bounded by Liberty Street to Howard Street and Baltimore Street to Saratoga Street, Stein said.

It was considered the biggest redevelopment proposal in the city since the Inner Harbor — and maybe even more aggressive, he said. But Harborplace was built on a demolished waterfront that had been open space and parking lots for years. The west side of downtown was a hodgepodge of small and large stores, many in buildings with historical value.

For a short time, Stein said, it seemed like the stars were aligning. The Superblock had the public, private and government support needed to make it a reality.

Then that support unraveled.

For the city to take ownership of those properties meant condemning them first. Many people equated “condemnation” with “demolition,” Stein said, and there was significant pushback from historical preservationists.

The city issued its first RFP in 2003, which eventually went to Lexington Square Partners. Opposition never let up, and then the Great Recession hit. The developer’s deal with the city ended acrimoniously, with a lawsuit that stalled revitalization for years.

Stein never worked for Lexington Square Partners. For more than 15 years, he managed a mall in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It’s anchored by a Target and located near a subway stop. The Superblock could have looked that way, he laments.

When asked what he would say to Taylor, Stein — now retired and living in Delaware — wished him luck.

“It’s really difficult to coordinate development on a piecemeal basis,” he said, adding that the BDC should return to a larger-scale approach.

But Stein still calls the west side of downtown a “golden opportunity.”

As for Taylor, the Michigander has put his roots down in Baltimore. He lives in Hampden with his wife and kids. He bikes to his downtown office through all four seasons.

He’s supervised projects that include Inner Harbor programming and analyzing the city’s different commercial districts, Taylor said, and he savors victories when they come. The Superblock doesn’t keep him up at night, though he spends a lot of time thinking about it.

Sometimes a light bulb goes off; other times he needs to step back and look at the Superblock with fresh eyes.

“What we can’t afford to do is to let these buildings sit vacant for another decade,” Taylor said. “There’s a puzzle here that can be pieced together.”