For one uninterrupted hour Saturday night, a procession of former Baltimore mayors came to the rotunda of City Hall, admired their own portraits and experienced only adulation.

There was no bad news from journalists, who were allowed to attend but not to ask questions. No sniping or mudslinging from political rivals. No constituents griping about a pothole or a busted streetlight. Just hugs, laughter and applause for four people who love this city and tried to make it better.

It was the portrait unveiling ceremony for mayors Sheila Dixon, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Catherine Pugh and Bernard “Jack” Young, who served from 2007 to 2020. The portraits of previous mayors are clustered in the Board of Estimates room on the second floor and scattered across City Hall.

Mayor Brandon Scott, perhaps knowing he will one day have a portrait unveiling, kept his remarks light, gracious and relatively vague.

“This collection of portraits will also add much-needed diversity to the walls of City Hall,” Scott said. “They include the first three women, and the best-looking bald head.”

He saved his warmest words for Rawlings-Blake, under whom he worked as a young political staffer. Rawlings-Blake is the only one of the four honorees who both won a mayoral election and went an entire term without having to step down amid a criminal investigation.

No one mentioned the FBI raiding Pugh’s home, the developer who showered gifts on Dixon and the plea deal that ended her corruption probe, or Rawlings-Blake’s heavily scrutinized response to the unrest following Freddie Gray’s death.

Scott did note Young’s “crazy” year and a half in office, which featured a cyberattack and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former mayors then came forward and, all at once, pulled down black sheets to reveal portraits that reflected their personalities and time in office. They each were given two minutes to address the crowd.

In Dixon’s portrait, painted by the street artist Gaia, she stands in a pink suit, looking into the distance as the sun sets behind her. The background, which appears to be Druid Lake, was a nod to her efforts to make Baltimore cleaner, greener and healthier, she said. Gaia attended the ceremony but was the only artist who didn’t come forward during the unveiling, which Dixon, seemingly puzzled, noted in her remarks.

Rawlings-Blake’s portrait, painted with bold brush marks by Megan Lewis, shows the former mayor looking straight ahead, unsmiling and projecting confidence. On the wall behind her are portraits within the portrait, including one of her father, the longtime state lawmaker Pete Rawlings, and her mother, Nina, a pediatrician.

Pugh’s portrait artist, Kennedy Ringgold, painted her smiling and wearing a blue dress as she stands beside the Baltimore Design School, which Pugh founded prior to becoming mayor. During her time as mayor, Pugh authored a children’s book called “Healthy Holly.” Few children read it. It was much more popular with the University of Maryland Medical System and other nonprofits that did business with the city and state.

“It’s really difficult for me to try to figure out, well, what will my legacy be?” said Pugh, who resigned from office and was later imprisoned for crimes related to the book sales. “It was often the best of times, and often the worst of times.”

Young, who became mayor following Pugh’s resignation, had the most traditional portrait, painted by Karen Warshal. He wears a blue suit and stands in City Hall, where he spent more than two decades as a city councilman, a council president and, briefly, a mayor.

The night was supposedly a celebration of Baltimore’s history and a call to honor the past, but little of that was discussed.

During these mayors’ 13 years in office, thousands of residents were beaten, stabbed or shot to death. Thousands more died from drug overdoses. Vacant houses spread like cancer. More than 50,000 Black residents left Baltimore during their tenures. A prized task force of cops terrorized residents, planted evidence and sold stolen drugs. And, when the 25-year-old Freddie Gray died in police custody, the city erupted in anger, putting Baltimore’s most fraught moments of civil breakdown on national TV.

It would be easy to stick these four mayors with the blame, to question whether things would have been better had others been elected. Perhaps they also reflect on that. After all, Saturday’s unveiling was billed as “Portraits of Power.”

But how much power does the mayor of a midsize, post-industrial American city have? Especially in a city like Baltimore, whose long, arduous decline has been predicted and chronicled for decades.

It began, more or less, in 1948, when state lawmakers enacted a law that stopped further annexation by the 81-square-mile city, erecting an invisible wall at its borders. And from behind this wall the surrounding counties have been expropriating Baltimore’s wealth ever since.

When a presidential task force, the Kerner Commission, tried to find the root cause of the race riots in Baltimore and other cities in the 1960s, its answer was emphatic — and largely ignored. White America was denying housing, educational and economic opportunities to Black America, artificially creating Black ghettos ringed by prosperous white suburbs, a chasm that was only growing more dystopic.

In the 1990s, as Baltimore County’s population eclipsed Baltimore City, the urbanologist David Rusk wrote a book warning that Baltimore was “programmed for inexorable decline” unless some kind of regional government was set up.

And by 2005, when a federal judge ruled on a decadelong discrimination case involving 14,000 Black families, he wrote that low-income housing policies had turned Baltimore into “an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region.”

Today, the manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that drew poor whites from Appalachia and poor Blacks from the South to Baltimore are gone. Some of the city’s biggest private employers are nonprofit institutions — hospitals and universities — that pay virtually no property tax.

Just 20% of the metropolitan population lives within its city limits. The lifeblood of government — money from property and income taxes — gets sucked out of Baltimore each time a commuter heads home from work and drives past city limits.

How much could Dixon, Rawlings-Blake, Pugh or Young have done to reverse or even stop this slide? Apparently, this question will be left for historians, not politicians.

Near the end of the event, Young said there was finally something he could say now that he was no longer in office.

“To hell with the media,” said Young, who finished a distant fifth in the 2020 Democratic mayoral primary and now lives in Baltimore County.

The line drew raucous applause from the audience. A few minutes later, the mayors and their families, friends and supporters went to a reception area for mocktails, shrimp and crab balls.