Two decades after Baltimore first solicited plans to redevelop a shopping district west of downtown, the Superblock has once again gone bust.

The Baltimore Development Corp., or BDC, said Monday that it canceled its contract with Westside Partners, after the group couldn’t show it had obtained financing for a mixed-use development.

President and CEO Colin Tarbert said the BDC plans to start a new bidding process and solicit fresh ideas for the Superblock early next year. It’s the latest delay for a city-led redevelopment that formally began in 2003.

For now, two full blocks of land owned almost entirely by the city — the area bound by North Howard Street, West Lexington Street, West Fayette Street and Park Avenue — will continue to sit vacant. Another half-block to the north, part of the original Superblock footprint, is an empty lot.

The original Superblock redevelopment lost steam and floundered until the city canceled the deal a decade later. In 2019, the city again solicited development proposals for some of these properties. Rather than take on the entire Superblock all at once, developers were invited to carve out bite-size portions.

Westside Partners won a bid to redevelop a large chunk of those properties, starting with the corner of North Howard and West Lexington streets. The group inked a deal in late 2020 and planned to build mix of residential, office and commercial space, along with an entertainment venue.

Westside Partners agreed to buy the properties from the city for $4.5 million once it secured financing. But after the BDC extended financing deadlines twice, Westside Partners still hasn’t shown it has the money for what was supposed to be a $155 million project called The Compass.

One of the developers leading Westside Partners, Chris Janian, has said The Compass was on the verge of shoring up its financing. In email last month, Janian, the president of the firm Vitruvius, said there was an equity partner who wanted to invest in The Compass, but the deal was still being hammered out.

Janian didn’t responded to a series of follow-up questions, and he didn’t identify the equity partner. Jayson Williams, CEO of Mayson-Dixon, another development firm that formed Westside Partners, deferred comment to Janian.

Baltimore’s storied commercial district

The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 razed much of downtown but left the area directly west unscathed. Anchored by large department stores, the West Side became the city’s marquee — and segregated — shopping district. In 1955, students from Morgan State College staged a sit-in at the lunch counter of Read’s Drug Store, five years before the better-known sit-ins at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Caroina.

Over time, the area’s commercial district suffered from white flight and competition from suburban shopping malls. In place of the large department stores, smaller vendors and niche stores opened, often operated by immigrants. They employed Black residents and catered to Black shoppers who lived nearby.

City officials have spent decades discussing different plans to overhaul the area. The general idea was to use eminent domain, buy out property owners and raze part of the West Side to make way for a new development that would compete with suburban shopping malls.

In the early 2000s, Baltimore Heritage and the Maryland Historical Trust produced a short documentary called “Baltimore’s West Side Story,” featuring interviews with several small merchants and then-Comptroller William Donald Schaefer.

Schaefer had advocated tearing down and rebuilding parts of Baltimore during his four terms as mayor. But in the documentary, he denounced “the gangs that believe in one thing — bulldozers.”

“I was of the theory that if you tore all the buildings down and put something new up, that was the right thing to do,” Schaefer said. “What a mistake that was.”

The documentary was dedicated to then-Mayor Martin O’Malley, whose administration kicked off the formal process to redevelop the area in 2003.

The original developer of the Superblock never got the project off the ground, even as the city bought up properties to make way for it. During Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s administration, the city cancelled the deal in 2013, paving the way years later for the bid by Westside Partners.

Under city ownership, the buildings that make up the Superblock deteriorated and decayed, despite efforts by preservationists

This summer, a building on the Fayette Street side of the Superblock collapsed overnight. According to Baltimore Fishbowl, the collapse took place the same day that military jets buzzed around downtown Baltimore as part of Maryland Fleet Week, causing many buildings to vibrate.

The building collapse took place near a bus stop. Local historian Nicole King said the city is lucky that no one was seriously injured or killed.

King, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has researched and written about the history of the Superblock. She has testified in favor of preserving many of the buildings, which are part of the city’s Five and Dime Historic District.

The first step the city should take is to stabilize the remaining portions of the Superblock, King said. The second is to stop repeating history.

“What they really want is for some big person to come in and put a lot of money in,” King said of the city. But that hasn’t worked, she said.

Instead, the city should focus on fostering and attracting the small merchants, King said, and repairing the harm created by the Superblock.

Watching the changes

Something felt wrong to Cheryl White, 63, the moment she stepped off a bus in downtown Baltimore and walked a few blocks west. It was her first day of work in the area in many years — and she said she’d never heard of the term “Superblock.”

White spent half her life working on the West Side, starting at a department store in 1983. At the beginning of the month, when everybody got paid, the streets were full of people walking from store to store, shopping, eating, talking and bumping shoulders, White said. The smell of food and peanuts wafted from Lexington Market and neighborhood shops. She often bought pig’s feet for breakfast.

White’s last job in the area was at Valu-Plus on West Lexington Street. The city bought the Valu-Plus property for the Superblock in 2008, according to property records. Around that time, White went to work at a Walmart in Baltimore County and stopped coming to the West Side.

This year, the Walmart closed. White called up a longtime friend who manages the Urban Outlet, a store on the corner of West Lexington Street and Park Avenue that they described like a mini-Walmart. On her first day of work a few months ago, White was stunned by the lack of people and all the empty storefronts.

Her friend, 53-year-old Jean Gray, pointed to positive signs, like new restaurants and apartments nearby, but said it’s not enough. She blamed the Superblock.

“It’s when downtown became dead,” Gray said. “They took all the stores away, and the Superblock is still not here yet.”