Baltimore City Snapshot
Baltimore’s industrial strength emerged through its textile mills, being well positioned with access to myriad inputs, including cotton production in the south, underemployed labor from Appalachia, shipbuilding in its harbor, and the B&O Railroad, which brought in a supply of coal. By the late 1800’s Baltimore was the producer of about 80 percent of the world’s cotton duck for use in sails on commercial and military ships. At their peak, about 4,000 workers were employed in the Hampden-Woodberry Mills. Later, in the early 20th century, canning factories along the Inner Harbor made Baltimore the country’s leader in canned fruits and vegetables. World War II shifted Baltimore’s industrial focus to steel and ship-building. Indeed, by the 1960s, Bethlehem Steel’s plant in Sparrows Point, which had turned out ingots used in the girders of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and cabling for the George Washington Bridge in New York, was the largest in the country. But by the second half of the 20th century, changes in production methods and trade policies eroded Baltimore’s dominance in steel. The city’s steel production dropped sharply, along with many of the industrial products that relied on it, especially the automobile.
The Baltimore region lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1995—three-quarters of its industrial employment.
On the other hand, the Port of Baltimore has remained strong in the era of global trade. In 2017 it experienced a record-breaking year for overall cargo shipments. But the Port’s strength now comes predominantly from growth in imports, not from shipping out finished products, as it once did. Manufacturing in Baltimore has pushed into suburban areas—as it has in most U.S. cities— and the sector’s connection to the Port has diminished.
A portion of the city’s remaining older industrial buildings are shuttered and crumbling from neglect, contributing to blight and declining property values in their neighborhoods. When resources are leveraged to redevelop these buildings, they are usually for conversion to residential and commercial uses; in the process, more and more of the city’s industrial capacity is lost.
Yet in a handful of these older industrial buildings, a new narrative is taking shape. In places like the Cambridge Building in Southwest Baltimore, or the Crown Cork and Seal complex in East Baltimore, a new generation of small light-manufacturers, along with other like-minded creative companies, is flourishing.New makerspaces, like Open Works and The Foundery, have re-inhabited formerly vacant industrial properties, and are turning them into hubs of maker education and innovation. Summer 2018 will see the opening of Union Collective, a multi-tenant industrial redevelopment project anchored by Union Craft Brewing, and backed by support from the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC). There are emerging bright spots in the service provision landscape as well. In 2016, the BDC expanded its Façade Improvement Grant (FIG) program to include industrial properties; in 2015, the Jane Addams Resource Corporation (JARC) opened a training facility in West Baltimore for CNC machining and welding; programs run by Citywide Youth Development and SewLab USA have begun training a new generation of workers for the sewn trades.
While statistics showcasing the decline in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are cited often, there are other numbers that tell different stories. Census data show that from2003 to 2012, the number of manufacturing businesses without employees—that is, where the owner is a sole proprietor—increased by 67 percent in Baltimore City, suggesting that entrepreneurship in the sector has been on the rise. Anecdotally, business owners report that, thanks to new technologies like 3-D printing and e-commerce platforms like Etsy, it has never been easier for a small business to design, produce, and distribute new products.
It was these developments that led the Baltimore Office of Sustainability to create the Made In Baltimore (MIB) program. Made In Baltimore supports, promotes, and studies the city’s emerging ‘maker economy’. In its founding year, Made In Baltimore partnered with the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (UMA) to participate in the State of Urban Manufacturing study. The goal was to gain a clearer understanding of what these emerging businesses needed to grow and thrive.