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Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: The Miller's Court project is very innovative
in the sense that we are providing a place for teachers to live, but also a place that
enhances the quality of life. Mix that together with support of not-for-profits like Teach
for America, and we're creating not just a building, not just a residence, not just an
office, but a community.
Female Speaker: Oh! Hey, there!
Male Speaker: How are you? How are you?
Female Speaker: Oh, I'm so happy to have a day off. How about that?
Tom Liebel: This was originally constructed as the HF
Miller & Sons Tin Box and Can Manufacturing Company, built in 1874, and HF Miller & Sons
was one of the founding members of the American Can Company. This is a brownfields site.
This building had been abandoned for 20 years, and had become a blight on the surrounding neighborhood.
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: This building is surrounded by strong neighborhoods:
Charles Village, Station North Arts District, Remington. This development helps us build
on those neighborhoods of strength. Baltimore has a strong sustainability plan. Reusing
our older buildings, our existing assets fits right into that plan.
Tom Liebel: To repurpose a building that served the city
for a hundred years admirably as a source of employment, and reconfiguring it for the
new economy, for the new century is what it's about. Back a hundred years ago, energy was
expensive, and incandescent lighting was a challenge, and air conditioning didn't exist,
so buildings were designed to make use of natural light. So a lot of what working with
old factories like this is actually allowing them to function the way they were originally designed.
Jon Constable: You know, everywhere we could we reused materials,
which was the environmentally friendly thing to do, but from an aesthetic standpoint, you know,
we exposed as much bricks as possible, all these beautiful old beams with pillowed capitals;
we really tried to bring them out as much as we can, and the final product is beautiful.
Donald Manekin: Through some very creative sort of financing
around historical tax credits and new market tax credits, the city put together a wonderful,
very low interest rate, loan package to us, as did the state.
Thibault Manekin: We're filling the buildings with people who
in their everyday lives and jobs are out there making our cities better places, and in our
case the real focus is on, you know, education, teachers, non-profit organizations.
Jon Constable: We've got a great variety of teachers in this
building. We really have representatives from just about every public school in Baltimore city.
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: Miller's Court allows us to be competitive
by creating this community of teachers and not-for-profits that support our schools.
We're creating something that is not available anywhere else in the country, and I know that
it is going to further support the work that we are doing in our school system.
Julie Oxenhandler: They've done an amazing job of kind of creating
a space where people can come together around a common cause, and the cause of this building
would definitely be education.
Stacie Sanders: So we were one of those little non-profits
that was stuck in a dilapidated, old row home where we had people like working in closets,
or like refurbished back porches; it was freezing in the winter and hot as anything in the summer,
and it's just a completely different world that we come into now when we come into our office.
Thibault Manekin: Our motto is to roll out the red carpet for
the people who we think are doing the most important work and tackling the biggest challenges
in our cities.
Tom Liebel: By taking projects like this, which were a
source of contamination, and cleaning them up, you are righting an environmental injustice
and helping to deliver to poorer neighborhoods, you know, the clean environment that everyone
should be entitled to. What we've done here in Baltimore, you could do in Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Raleigh-Durham -- pick wherever you want to. This is exceedingly
replicable, and we'd love to see this kind of project happen other places. It's not unique
to Baltimore. It could be done anywhere, and we hope that it is.
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: I think it's important for Baltimore to reinvent
itself, and that's how you thrive in today's economy. We have fantastic older buildings
that are just screaming to be reused, and they need to be reused in ways that are going
to spark the rebirth of our city, and this building is just one of those examples. I
always look for opportunities to reuse our historic buildings, because our manufacturing-based
economy has shifted into healthcare, into tourism -- things where we don't need these
warehouses, but we can find new ways to use them and to create a new Baltimore.
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