Power Plant Live!

The "Power Plant" is a mixed-use project re-developed in the late 1990s in a former coal-burning power generating station, originally built in 1900-05 for the old United Railways and Electric Company which operated the recently unified public transportation system of streetcars, trolleys, and some cable cars (in the early years), at the beginning of the 20th century up to its re-organization in 1935 as the Baltimore Transit Company (taken over by the state Mass Transit Administration of the Maryland Department of Transportation in 1968).

It was also traditionally known as the "Marsh Market" because of being on the site of the old Thomas "Harrison's Marsh" on the western banks of the Jones Falls during the colonial era 18th and early 19th centuries which separated old Baltimore Town from the neighboring village of Jones' Town to the northeast across the Falls - spanned by a vital link in early 18th century local commerce and growth, a wooden bridge which was built which resulted in the naming of "Bridge Street" (later to be renamed North Gay Street, after a local family) and led to the merger of the two villages by 1745.

He noted the calmer differences in the southern-oriented city, especially then three years after the secessionist tumult resulting in the disastrous Pratt Street Riots of April 19, 1861 which had solidified Baltimore's reputation and nickname as "Mobtown."

A new plaza was also constructed that year (1907), featuring a beautiful marble and stone fountain specifically designated by a noted animal-loving philanthropist, General A. E. Booth, for the laboring horses of the busy and crowded commercial district who toiled under heavy weights, reins, blinders, stirrups and heavily loaded cargo wagons, at the end of their ancient era and the beginning of motorized trucks and lorries and their smells of gasoline and diesel fuel odors.

By 1984, the traffic concerns and space problems caused the local wholesale fish merchants and those in the other markets to consider moving their delivery and transport centers to a new auto and truck oriented complex built between Baltimore and Washington in Jessup, Maryland along the connecting Interstate (95 and 295) and U.S. Route 1 highways.

Despite the best efforts of then Mayor William Donald Schaefer and others of his administration and tourism leaders, who had a wonderful vision of an eastern version of San Francisco's famous "Fisherman's Wharf" and the nearby Monterey, California's "Fish Cannery" complex, plus Washington, D.C.'s "Fish Market" which was centered on moored barges along the side channel of the Potomac River at Maine Avenue just south of the National Mall and a continuing center of popularity by the national capital's Washingtonians.

This concept was in the days before additional commercial and residential development had moved east and south across the Falls and began butting up against the tightly packed alley-streets with small brick and a few wooden rowhouses and restaurants of "Old Town" (renamed of colonial Jones Town), "Little Italy" (in the renamed southern portion of old colonial "Jones Town") and the future "Harbor East" of high-rise hotels, office and apartment skyscrapers developed in the 1990s, followed by "Harbor Point" to the southeast on the small heavily polluted soil of the peninsula jutting into the Inner Harbor, formerly the site of a large ugly Allied-Signal chrome manufacturing/refining works since the Issac and Jesse Tyson and Brian Philpot beginnings in the 1840s.

It was used briefly as a background scene during several segments about a license-revocation hearing before the newly established state Home Improvement Commission in locally raised, famous Hollywood producer, Barry Levinson's movie "Tin Men" (starring Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito, and Barbara Hershey about Baltimore's nostalgic, but amusing aluminum-siding salesmen of the early 1960s) in 1987.

After Mayor Schaefer had moved on in that year to become Governor of Maryland, a new re-development proposal for the Centre Market Place was considered by expansion from the recent "Power Plant" amusement and retail complex on Pratt Street's old Pier 4 and the Inner Harbor.

Across the square with the still-flowing former horse fountain on the east side was constructed the Port Discovery children's museum in the old Wholesale Fish Market building, which was given a long-term lease by the City Council and government agencies (opened 1998).

The two red-glazed brick structures with unusual sloping walls facing Lombard Street were named for Dr. Harry Bard (first president of the new junior college) and Dr. William Lockwood.