[citation needed] In 1957, Wallace moved to Baltimore and headed a team to prepare a plan for the city's ailing central business district, which had not had any major new construction projects since the end of the 1920s.
By 1980, with the addition of developer James Rouse's "festival marketplaces" of Harborplace along the promenade, the project had become a well-known urban success story of the 1980s.
The catalytic idea in the Lower Manhattan Plan (LMP) was to develop a predominantly residential community on land created by filling between the bulkhead and pier head lines at both Hudson and East Rivers, adjacent to the single-use commercial centers.
Over the next decade, the firm developed plans for the central areas of New Orleans, Buffalo in New York, Miami, Orlando, and Jacksonville in Florida, Oakland and Los Angeles in California, and Baltimore's MetroCenter, all employing Wallace's growth modeling method combined with catalytic projects unique to each.
The LMP's full public access to the rivers and continuous walkways at the water's edge caught the attention of John Weingart, director of New Jersey's Division of Coastal Zone Management.
Part of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, his division had been assigned regulatory control over a 300-foot (91 m)-deep coastal waterfront, and he saw the LMP concept as applicable.
He retained Wallace Roberts & Todd (after McHarg left the firm) to prepare the plan and develop design guidelines for the 18-mile (29 km), nine-community facility.