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Johns Hopkins volunteers Any Chen (center) and Jonathan Lasko help a student move into Charles Commons on 33rd Street.(Photo by Mike Buscher / Special to The Sun)

Yesterday's Baltimore Sun reports on the new dorm-mixed use building opening up in Charles Village for Johns Hopkins. The campus bookstore will be reopening in Baltimore in that building (moving from being on campus). See "Hopkins dorm opens, igniting renewal hopes." From the article:

Though Charles Village has a reputation for jealously protecting its quirky, iconoclastic image of "painted lady" Victorian rowhouses and bohemian edge, the mood on the street among students, residents and veteran Charles Village merchants was mostly supportive of national retail chains and upscale shopping options." It's fantastic," said Eli Sendelman, 21, an art history major from New York City. "I think it's good to gussy up the neighborhood a little bit. Not too much, but it needs a kick, a swift kick."

When he arrived in Charles Village three years ago, Sendelman said he "didn't understand why the main drag, as it were, was so dismal. Why couldn't they have a little [Harvard Square] going on around here?" ...

Paula Berger, Hopkins dean of undergraduate education, said impetus for action partly came from a 2002-2003 university commission she chaired that found deep discontent among undergraduates about their residential and social lives. Among the commission's findings was that undergraduates lacked spaces to socialize, shared few traditions other than cutthroat academic competitiveness, and often felt like second-class citizens in a university whose national reputation was largely made on the strengths of its graduate programs in medicine, science and engineering."

Plenty of evidence suggests that improving residential and social life can go a long way toward breaking an endemic culture of competitiveness and complaint," the Commission on Undergraduate Education said in its final report. ...

Beth Bullamore, outgoing president of the Charles Village Civic Association, said she expected the new residence hall would reduce undergraduate demand for rowhouse rentals, which would in turn encourage landlords to upgrade them or sell to prospective single-family occupants."The best part of this is we get the residential areas back for permanent, full-time residents and the students [go into] space that's more appropriate for them," Bullamore said.

...Indeed, some Charles Village residents worried that gentrification would force them to leave the neighborhood. Jeremiah Spencer, 29, an engineering technician who makes less than $40,000 a year, said he would likely leave the area after renting there for six years, and try to buy a house north of Patterson Park. "I don't want to see Starbucks here," Spencer said. "I absolutely hate those condos. I always wanted to buy a house in Charles Village and now it's unobtainable."

These things go both ways. But it is possible to seed commercial district retail revitalization by locating college bookstores in the business district that usually adjoins a campus. Apparently this is happening in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania right now (and is extant in places like Pratt in Brooklyn, Penn in Philadelphia, College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, and others). See "Barnes & Noble gives W-B ol’ college try: Woolworth’s building is site of store for the public and King’s/Wilkes students."

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization; town-gown