Harbor of dreams

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Richard Swirnow says his bid for the old Bethlehem Steel company shipyard in the 1980s was a long shot. Today he controls one of the prime sites on the Baltimore waterfront and has extensive plans for its continued development. Photo by Eric Stocklin

Baltimore developer Richard Swirnow controls one of the city’s most valuable pieces of real estate, the 14.5-acre swath of Inner Harbor shoreline where he built his upscale HarborView housing complex. The condominiums, townhouses and pier homes are the fruition of more than two decades of planning and building. But Swirnow said luck was even more important. The land where HarborView now stands once belonged to Bethlehem Steel Corp., which just 25 years ago operated a ship repair yard on the same land that employed hundreds of Baltimoreans. But the yard closed in 1982, as the bottom dropped out of the U.S. shipbuilding industry, and Swirnow managed to acquire it. The “lucky” purchase, as he calls it, gave speed to a metamorphosis already under way along Baltimore’s waterfront, changing it from a gritty, industrial hub to an upscale destination for home owners and tourists.“We never thought we would be the ones to buy it,” Swirnow recalled during a recent interview in his wood-paneled office located above a yacht club at the former shipyard. Residents of the nearby Federal Hill neighborhood were equally surprised with Swirnow’s involvement. They protested his plans, which ultimately replaced the shipyard with high-priced housing most existing residents could not afford. “The HarborView tower is Richard Swirnow, and most people don’t like the HarborView tower,” said Keith Losoya, a former president of the Federal Hill Neighborhood Association. Even now, two decades after the city approved Swirnow’s plans, neighbors continue to protest as pieces of the HarborView property are built out. This summer, residents persuaded the city to issue a stop-work order on Swirnow’s new pier homes, saying they violated height regulations. The issue was ultimately tabled, with the city ruling in favor of Swirnow. But Swirnow expects to hear other complaints when construction begins on his new 17-story Pinnacle condominium tower, also planned for Key Highway. After that, he foresees some more opposition when he begins developing the final 5.5 acres of the former Bethlehem Steel lot, which could begin in the next few years.“We have some people who, since we started here, have been absolutely, totally, overwhelmingly opposed to it,” Swirnow said of HarborView. “You always have some of that in development.”Early daysLove him or hate him, no one can deny that Swirnow helped change the face of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. But the native New Yorker never thought he would spend most of his adult life in Baltimore, let alone develop it. As a young man, he cared more about the technical aspect of building and came to Baltimore to study engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, where he received his degree in 1961. Swirnow — now a gray-haired, pony-tailed gentleman who appears to be in his late 60s — refuses to reveal his age, for reasons that remain unclear.“Johns Hopkins is what brought me here, and I’m forever indebted,” Swirnow said. “I doubt that I could have done what I did as I did it if it hadn’t been for Hopkins.”While attending the school, he worked in a university lab developing aluminum, as well as for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After he graduated, his wife, Rae, got pregnant, and he took on work as a real estate agent to earn a nest egg for his growing family. “I had no training whatsoever,” Swirnow said. “I didn’t even know how to use the multiple listings that the company had.”But that did not stop him. He used the newspaper classified section to find customers, and found that cold calling worked. “And this is the kid that doesn’t know anything and nobody taught him anything … and before you know it I’m starting to list more than anybody else [in the office],” he remarked. “That’s how I got into the real estate business.”After only a few months as an agent, Swirnow went into business with a partner, marketing houses for a home builder. Eventually, they partnered with that builder on new projects. Now a building team, Swirnow and his partners launched a venture in 1972 selling a Canadian steel-flooring system in the mid-Atlantic region. That operation morphed into what is now Swirnow Building Systems Management LLC, run by Swirnow’s son.During the 1970s, Swirnow continued his construction work without much publicity. That is, until he decided to make a bid for the Bethlehem Steel shipyard.Death of a shipyardWhen Bethlehem Steel advertised the land sale, the company said the buyer must keep the property in use as a shipyard. Swirnow claims that when he bid on the site, he never expected to win. “It was really an important economic issue for the city because all of those people … would be laid off,” he said. “So we figured, well, let us throw our hat into the game, and maybe if somebody’s sitting on the fence we can push somebody off the fence and make them come to a conclusion.”Initially, another company won the bid for the site. But that deal fell through, and Swirnow’s team was next in line. “We lucked out,” he remarked. “We never thought that we would be here doing this; we thought that we would be the catalyst to make somebody else step up and save this business for the benefit of the community.”But, when he did win, Swirnow said he intended to keep the site as a ship repair yard. Mark Deering, a Federal Hill resident during the 1980s and now a broker with MacKenzie Commercial Real Estate Services LLC, said neighbors did not trust Swirnow. They thought all along that he wanted to convert the site to a residential development, Deering said.Swirnow denies the conspiracy theory. “A lot of people will say they don’t believe that,” Swirnow conceded. “A lot of people will say, ‘You had to have an ulterior motive.’”It was difficult to find financing, but at the last minute a bank decided to fund the project as a shipyard. Then, after realizing the ship repair industry was in a fatal decline, that bank began pushing the project toward residential real estate, Swirnow said. The same bank foreclosed on the property in 1985. Again, Swirnow thought the property was not destined for him. But again, last-minute financing, this time from a Bangkok bank, led to Swirnow’s winning bid on the property during a tax sale. “How many lives does a cat have?” Swirnow wondered. “It should have been over.”Swirnow settled on the property in 1986. The rest is history.Expansion plansHe demolished the Bethlehem Steel yard, making way for the HarborView luxury condominium tower and a marina in the early 1990s. Swirnow now lives in a 4,400-square-foot penthouse on the top floor of the 26-story tower, which has nearly 300 units. Townhouses came next, then pier homes,
which are currently being erected along Key Highway. Planning is under way for the Pinnacle tower and, in the next decade, the final 5.5 acres will be filled with more homes and commercial space, Swirnow noted. Despite the neighborhood battles, the developer takes pride in the final product.“The goal was that we provide housing here where people would not just work and take their check to the suburbs but would work and live here,” Swirnow said. “I believed and publicly said that this was the beginning of the second renaissance of Baltimore.”Others say Swirnow nurtures delusions of grandeur. “I think HarborView is a successful project, but certainly not the catalyst,” said M.J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corp., the city’s economic development arm. Baltimore developer J. Joseph Clarke of J.J. Clarke Enterprises Inc. said he would stop short of giving HarborView credit for Baltimore’s revival.“But I’ve never been in a discussion about development around the harbor that didn’t in some way touch on HarborView,” Clarke conceded. “Condos until recent years were completely unexpected in Baltimore.”“He was not the catalyst, but he was certainly involved early on in the process of developing the waterfront,” Deering, the former Federal Hill resident, said. Leisurely pursuitsWhen Swirnow is not working on HarborView, he can be found participating in various philanthropic activities. He is on the board of directors for the local chapter of Easter Seals, a health care-oriented nonprofit. He also runs a program called Adopt-A-Turkey, which gives free Thanksgiving meals to Baltimore charities. “I am a very fortunate person to be able to be doing what I do … for as many years as I have done it, without feeling that I’m tired, without feeling that enough is enough,” he said. Otherwise, he spends time with his wife, three children and six grandchildren. Cruising around the world one or more times a year is his favorite “escape.” Travel will also play a significant role in his retirement, although he is not sure when that will be. What Swirnow does know is that he does not want to see HarborView fade without him.“After I’m done, I would like to see not a business that’s closed up but a business that continues to run by the people who have been as loyal as they have,” he said.