Baltimore Sun, January 26, 2008:

Sports apparel maker Under Armour Inc., which expects to outgrow its headquarters in Baltimore's Tide Point in about five years, is eyeing West Covington, an industrial swath of Middle Branch shoreline that city officials want to transform into an extensive mixed-use development.

Officials at Baltimore Development Corp. have talked with Under Armour executives about West Covington and several other city sites as a possible home for a future corporate headquarters in an effort to help the company grow, said M.J. "Jay" Brodie, president of the BDC.

"It's obviously in the city's interest to try to find possibilities for them within the 80 square miles of Baltimore," Brodie said. "We've looked at all sorts of sites together, and one of the sites that is of interest to them is West Covington."

The southern edge of the City including Middle Branch, South Baltimore, Curtis Bay, Westport, etc., are all the ruins of rust belt economics. Pompeii has ruins; South Baltimore very broadly defined has ruins. Among the ruins are the remnants of one of the best streetcar networks on the continent, a network that reportedly pumped out streetcars down the tracks more than one a minute at rush hour on some routes in Dundalk and elsewhere during WWII.

The Middle Branch waterfront is an underused asset, though one not terribly easy to access. I hope that Under Armour stays in Baltimore and doesn't leave to the County to slash its property taxes by more than half.