An Open Letter to Baltimore: What If We Built on the Water?

Baltimore, I had a thought. It may be impractical. It may be wildly expensive. It may violate several laws of engineering that I haven't yet learned. And honestly, it may not work at all.

But I can't stop thinking about it.

So I'm putting it out into the community simply as a Baltimorean who enjoys looking at problems from strange angles. And maybe there's a little more personal history behind the thought than that. For as long as I can remember, one of my bucket-list wishes has been to see Baltimore have its own basketball team.

I can trace that wish back to being a kid sitting in the auditorium at Northwood Elementary, listening to the possibility of Baltimore getting a basketball team. I don't remember every detail of that conversation anymore.

But I remember what it felt like to hear that possibility as a young Baltimorean. The idea stuck. Years later, I still find myself imagining what it would feel like to see this city come alive around basketball. To have our own team, our own arena, our own nights where the city gathers around the game.

And somewhere along the way, that old wish collided with another habit of mine:
What if we didn't just build a basketball arena? What if we built something that could only exist in Baltimore? So here's the thought. What if we built a basketball stadium in the Inner Harbor? Not a stadium on the shore.

A floating basketball stadium.

Imagine walking toward the harbor and seeing a full basketball court sitting out on the water. Fans surrounding it. Lights reflecting across the harbor at night. Basketball being played over the water, with Baltimore's skyline behind it.Maybe that's where the idea should end.

But my mind kept going.
Because a floating stadium has a problem. The water moves. Waves move it. Boats create wakes. Wind moves it. The tide changes its relationship to the water.

A basketball court, however, has a very different requirement:

Stay level.

So now we have an engineering problem. How do you build a floating structure capable of keeping a basketball court stable enough for athletes to play on it while everything underneath and around it is constantly moving?

I don't know the answer.But I started wondering whether we could make the problem itself useful. Instead of simply fighting the movement of the water, what if we harvested it?

Imagine mechanisms beneath the court designed to absorb pitching, rolling, and vertical movement. Hydraulic systems, counterweights, gyroscopic systems, mechanical dampers, linear generators—or technologies that I don't even know enough about yet to name.

The movement that threatens the stability of the court could potentially become part of the system that stabilizes it.

And if that movement can be converted into usable energy...

Then I had another thought. What if the machinery underneath the stadium wasn't only keeping the court level? What if it was cleaning the harbor?

Now the basketball stadium becomes something much stranger.

It becomes a piece of environmental infrastructure. Above the water:

Basketball

Below the water:

Engineering.

And throughout the system:

Energy generation, water circulation, filtration, monitoring, and restoration.

The same harbor that is constantly moving the structure could potentially help power the machinery working to improve the harbor itself. That creates a fascinating closed loop:

Water movement → mechanical energy → stabilization → electricity → water treatment → cleaner harbor.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea isn't really about a stadium. It's about a question Baltimore has answered before.Baltimore has reinvented itself before.

I think about William Donald Schaefer.

Not because I believe he was perfect. Not because I think every decision made during Baltimore's redevelopment was perfect. And not because I think revitalization should ever mean forgetting the people who were already here.

I think about him because he understood something fundamental:

A city sometimes has to imagine a different economic future when the old one is disappearing.

Baltimore had been deeply tied to manufacturing, industry, shipping, and the working waterfront. As those industries declined and major plants closed, the economic foundation that had supported generations of Baltimoreans was changing.

Schaefer recognized that reality and pushed aggressively toward another model. One built around the waterfront, tourism, conventions, attractions, development, and a city that people would have a reason to visit.

The Inner Harbor became the physical expression of that idea.

But there's an important detail in that history that I don't want to erase.

Schaefer didn't invent the Inner Harbor vision by himself.

The groundwork for redevelopment had begun before his administration, particularly under Mayor Theodore McKeldin in the 1960s. Schaefer inherited that vision and became one of the people most responsible for pushing it into reality. Harborplace, the National Aquarium, the Convention Center, and other major projects became pieces of the transformation that followed. ([Baltimore Magazine][2])

That's actually more inspiring to me. Because it means great civic projects aren't necessarily the product of one person.

One administration can plant the seed. Another can cultivate it. Another generation can take it somewhere nobody originally imagined.

And that's how I see this idea. Not as my stadium. Not as my solution. As another seed. I also think about the broader history of Black civic leadership in American cities. Walter Washington, the first mayor of Washington, D.C. and the first African-American mayor of a major American city, represented a historic expansion of what urban leadership could look like. ([Wikipedia][3])

Baltimore has its own important chapter in that story.

Clarence “Du” Burns became Baltimore's first Black mayor in 1987, succeeding Schaefer when Schaefer left City Hall to become governor. Burns had served as City Council president and had worked alongside Schaefer on Inner Harbor development legislation. ([Maryland State Archives][4])

Then came Kurt Schmoke, who became Baltimore's first Black mayor elected to a full term.

That history matters to me because it reminds me that civic imagination is also about providence—about recognizing that the work of one generation can create the conditions for another generation to take its place and carry something forward.

The city changes. The people change. The challenges change. But the responsibility remains:

What are we going to build with what was handed to us?

That is the question I want to bring into this idea. Because if Schaefer's generation could look at a declining industrial waterfront and imagine a tourist destination...

What should our generation imagine?

If their question was:

“How do we bring people back to the harbor?”

Maybe ours can be:

“How do we bring people back to the harbor while making the harbor better?”

That's where the basketball stadium becomes interesting again. Imagine if the next great Inner Harbor project didn't simply consume waterfront space.

Imagine if it gave something back.

Imagine if the attraction itself became environmental infrastructure. Imagine if people came to Baltimore to watch basketball and discovered that the structure beneath them was simultaneously researching water quality, recovering energy, supporting marine life, educating students, and testing new technologies.

Imagine if the harbor became a destination not only because it was beautiful, but because people came here to see what Baltimore was experimenting with next.

That could mean tourism. It could mean hospitality. It could mean restaurants, hotels, transportation, vendors, artists, event workers and small businesses benefiting from increased activity.

It could mean construction and manufacturing jobs.

It could mean marine engineering, robotics, software, environmental science, electrical engineering and water-quality careers. It could mean apprenticeships.

It could mean STEM education.

It could mean an engineering competition that starts in a classroom and eventually produces infrastructure sitting in the harbor.

And it could mean something else:

Baltimore becoming an environmental leader instead of merely talking about environmental recovery. What if visitors could see the data? What if students could tour the machinery? What if engineers from around the world came here to compete?

What if the technology developed here could eventually be adapted to other waterfront cities? What if Baltimore exported not just products, but ideas about how cities can live with their water?

That is the kind of economic revival I'm imagining. Not simply bringing people downtown. Not simply building something expensive. Not simply creating jobs while construction is underway. But creating an ecosystem where sports, tourism, engineering, education, environmental restoration, manufacturing, entrepreneurship and culture reinforce one another.

I am presenting a challenge.

Maybe the first step isn't Is just to digest and test the concept itself. Maybe it reveals one piece of the concept that actually works. Then we build on that.

Maybe eventually, years from now, we find ourselves standing on a floating basketball court in the Inner Harbor, watching a game while machinery beneath us quietly moves water, generates energy, monitors an ecosystem, and keeps the court level.

And maybe someone asks:

“Who came up with this?”

And the answer isn't particularly important.

Because by then it won't belong to the person who imagined it.

It will belong to Baltimore.

That's the kind of revival I'm interested in.

A revival that respects the past without becoming trapped by it.

A revival that remembers the factories and workers who once made the waterfront an engine of Baltimore's economy.

A revival that recognizes the leaders who helped reinvent that waterfront.

A revival that honors the generations of Black civic leadership that expanded the possibilities of who could lead American cities.

Baltimore, what would happen if we tried to solve this?

— A Baltimorean, thinking a little outside his field

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Donald_Schaefer?utm_source=chatgpt.com "William Donald Schaefer"

[2]: https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/then-now-inner-harbor/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Then and Now: Inner Harbor - Baltimore Magazine"

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Washington?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Walter Washington"

[4]: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/012400/012490/html/post14jan2003.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com "\"Clarence 'Du' Burns, 84, Dies; Baltimore's First Black Mayor.\" The Washington Post, 14 January 2003."