He's lost the love of his life, but a shared passion for Baltimore still
drives powerful development watchdog 'Jay' Brodie.
By Scott Calvert
Sun Staff
October 27, 2003
He hardly looks like
one of the most powerful people in Baltimore. A jovial, elfin man with gray
hair, he doesn't wear fancy suits, run in elite circles or live in a big house.
He doesn't even use a briefcase, lugging his voluminous files under one arm
wherever he goes.
Yet as head of the city's economic development agency,
M.J. "Jay" Brodie wields major influence over his hometown's look and feel, and
has for many years. Right now he is shaping one of the biggest city projects in
years, and one of the biggest in his 40-year career.
Last week, Brodie
announced that the board of his agency, the Baltimore Development Corp., was
endorsing billionaire Robert Johnson's plan to build a $200 million convention
hotel near Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The final decision will be Mayor Martin
O'Malley's, but Brodie has strong pull at City Hall and is sure to have a say in
the outcome.
Brodie's power, and proximity to it, make some in town
anxious; he's heard complaints about handouts given developers, the quality of
the city's architecture and the Willy Wonka-style secrecy with which he runs the
BDC, technically a private, nonprofit agency.
The hotel project, aimed at
reviving the city's ailing convention business, takes up much of his time these
days in his office high in a downtown tower. But as consumed as he is by the
work, Brodie, 67, has other things on his mind right now as well. Genie, for
one.
His wife of 44 years, Georgene "Genie" Brodie died a year ago this
month. For Brodie, her absence has meant struggling through a new emptiness in
his daily life.
"Some people told me the first year was the hardest,"
says Brodie, who still wears his wedding band. "I believe that."
Without
Genie by his side, his accomplishments in rebuilding a shrinking city long past
its prime bring him less pleasure. Not only was she his life partner, she was
one of his -- and the city's -- biggest fans. Even as she lay dying last year,
she wrote her first- ever song, an unself-consciously sappy ode to Baltimore --
the "city we adore." Brodie still listens to a recording of it sometimes in his
Wyman Park rowhouse.
Brodie, in fact, views his $155,940-a-year job as an
extension of a civic and personal commitment that goes back decades to his days
as a top city housing official. When his daughters were young, he and Genie took
them on Sunday drives through the city, exploring its nooks and crannies. In the
1970s, the Brodies became pioneers when the family moved to the experimental
Coldspring New Town community in Northwest Baltimore.
It would be no
exaggeration to say Brodie has had two lifelong love affairs, one with his wife
and family, the other with his hometown. Though his decision-making as the head
of BDC is sometimes questioned, no one questions his intentions.
"He
truly loves Baltimore, this man," says Anthony Ambridge, a former city
councilman turned developer. "I don't know anyone who so single-mindedly loves
the city as Jay Brodie."
Menasha Jacob Brodie was born in Baltimore at
the height of the Depression. As a boy he lived with his parents, Meyer and
Sarah, in a small North Broadway apartment above her father's tailor shop. Meyer
Brodie -- he was Berdichevsky until he passed through immigration at Ellis
Island -- had left Ukraine after World War I to farm in New Jersey, then ended
up in Baltimore selling liquor.
Sarah Rachliss had emigrated from Poland
with her family around the same time Meyer got out of Ukraine. She graduated
from Eastern High School, the first in her family to earn a diploma, and went on
to work as a secretary in the city water department.
Meyer Brodie yearned
for a house of his own and saved for it until he had enough money to build a
home on a steep Northwest Baltimore lot nobody else wanted.
As he grew
up, Jay Brodie (Menasha never stuck) moved through the public schools,
graduating from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and enrolling at the University
of Virginia to study architecture on a scholarship. The man who later struck
some as tweedy enough to come from a line of economics professors was, in fact,
the first in his family to finish college.
His life took a major turn in
the summer of 1954, after freshman year at Virginia, when he went with friends
to the movies on North Avenue. Georgene Gonzales, a dark-haired education
student at Towson State College, was on duty as an usher. He was 17 and smitten
by her sparkling brown eyes and bright smile.
The cinema became Brodie's
favorite haunt. He persuaded the manager to let him in free since he wasn't
watching any movies, and for a month he and Genie made small talk as he worked
up the courage to ask her out. Their first date was at the movies.
When
summer faded to fall, she visited him in Charlottesville, Va., where he took
time out from his studies to dabble in poetry. A snapshot shows him looking
dapper in a suit, one hand jauntily resting on his hip.
His parents did
not like the fact that Genie was Protestant. The longer he dated her, the
unhappier they became. When they cut off his college funding, he took a job as
house steward for his fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi.
The Brodies, though,
did not back down even after Genie offered to convert to Judaism. They wanted
her to spend a year living with an Orthodox family to learn Jewish customs.
Faced with a choice between love and family, Brodie chose Genie. His father
would later reconcile with him; his mother would become Genie's dear friend. But
on their wedding day in May 1958, neither parent was there.
Urban
renaissance
Jay Brodie never imagined a career in public service. As
a boy, he had watched an architect design his father's turreted dream house on
Pinkney Road and decided to pursue the same career. That was still his plan when
he and his wife returned to Baltimore in 1960. With a master's degree from Rice
University, he joined a design firm on Charles Street.
Not two years
later, Brodie, then a Woody Allen lookalike with thick glasses, was leafing
through the want ads when a listing caught his eye. The city's Urban Renewal and
Housing Agency needed an architect/planner. He applied on a whim, got an offer
and took the $7,800 a year job. "I thought it would be fun for a couple years,"
he recalls. But he stayed much longer, rising to chief planner and, in 1969, at
age 33, to deputy commissioner.
Those were heady times. Urban renewal
programs, fed by a river of federal money, were blooming across America. The
do-it-now ethos of William Donald Schaefer, elected mayor in 1971, only added to
the fervor.
In 1977, Brodie moved up to commissioner. But the landscape
was changing; federal funding was drying up, and so was Schaefer's patience with
the pace of change. White flight, meanwhile, continued to sap the
city.
One obvious bright spot was the Inner Harbor. With government funds
as a catalyst, the glassy Hyatt Regency Hotel took shape on Light Street in
1980. Then there was Harborplace, the complex of shops, food stalls and
restaurants that planners hoped would herald an urban renaissance.
It had
fallen to Schaefer, Brodie and other officials to sell a skeptical public on the
notion that the twin green-roofed pavilions would pay off for the city. They won
the referendum and from opening day in 1980, crowds swarmed the
waterfront.
No place like home
One of the first vendors in
the Harborplace shops was Georgene Brodie. Her little shop sold all things crab,
and she thought up (or at least successfully marketed) a puckish phrase still
seen on tourist T- shirts: "Don't bother me, I'm crabby."
The business
reflected the Brodies' incurable fondness for the city. If Jay's job was to make
the city better, the Brodie clan -- Jay, Genie and daughters Kimberly and Ellen
-- got into the act in their daily lives.
"Most people took their kids to
the playground," says daughter Ellen Jarrett, now 40. "I did lots of grand
openings, groundbreakings, dedications. We took tours of public
housing."
A Sunday ritual emerged. After services at their downtown
church, it was on to Jack's Corned Beef and then up and down various alleys to
make sure they were free of trash and fallen tree limbs.
There were trips
to the country, too, and occasional summer trips to Europe. But the city was the
family's focus. Except for one unhappy year, the Brodies lived within city
limits, moving from Charles Village to Reservoir Hill to Tuxedo Park to
Coldspring New Town, a public-private experiment in Northwest Baltimore that
never really took off, but was home for more than two decades.
In March
1984, Brodie's career was jolted. Schaefer eased him out as housing
commissioner. The mayor never publicly explained the move, though he had at
times been displeased with how Brodie ran the 1,000-employee housing
agency.
Brodie left the city's employ and, for the first time in 25
years, did not work in Baltimore. He went to Washington to run the Pennsylvania
Avenue Development Corp., formed to energize the corridor between the White
House and Capitol. He stayed nine years, learning more about public-private
development deals, before moving to the Washington office of the RTKL
architecture firm.
But he grew tired of the corporate world. He missed
the diversity he knew and liked as Baltimore's housing commissioner. In 1995, he
called Schaefer's successor, Kurt L. Schmoke. Do you have a job? he
asked.
In January 1996, Brodie took his current title: president of
Baltimore Development Corp., the city's private, nonprofit development arm. He
was back in the city he loved, with a second major opportunity to guide its
development.
Straightening things out
When he took over at
BDC, the Brodies were still living at Coldspring. Only now the girls were grown,
and Jay and Genie were 60-something grandparents. Not that that meant slowing
down.
Always eager dancers, the couple began taking to the ice, learning
the waltz and tango and other styles at Northwest Ice Rink.
They shared
an eclectic music collection that included the Beatles, Nat King Cole, Pavarotti
and Paul Simon.
When they weren't watching the Orioles on television,
they might curl up with the edgy Elmore Leonard mystery novels Genie loved. He
enjoyed goofy, self-deprecating jokes, punctuating them with a snorting
guffaw.
In the mornings they left notes for each other. He wrote on the
cardboard cutouts that came with the dry cleaning. She reminded him to stop and
smell the roses.
Brodie didn't have much time to do that, given his
mandate from Schmoke: Straighten out the wayward BDC.
At the time, "it
was really floundering," says Roger Lipitz, a health care executive who chaired
the agency's board for six years beginning in 1995. "Bad deals were getting
done. Good deals weren't, because it wasn't well managed."
That has
changed, some observers say.
Despite the slumping national economy,
cranes are visible around downtown. Efforts to revive the city's chronically
ailing west side finally seem to be taking root with the Hippodrome Theatre's
revival and new housing. Other projects include new parking garages, Mercy
Hospital's expansion and the conversion of antiquated office buildings into
apartments. BDC has played some role in many of these deals.
Even as
Brodie has advocated for minority developers to reflect the city's diversity,
says development consultant Alfred W. Barry III, he's also put in place a more
data-driven approach meant to make the best use of public money and decrease the
role of politics.
Brodie has readily -- too readily, critics say -- used
what he calls a "tool box" of subsidies to make these deals. In an era of
minimal federal largesse, he says, the job demands creativity. With support from
the Board of Estimates, Brodie has arranged big property tax breaks, for
instance, while also using City Council-approved eminent domain power to collect
land for resale at steep discounts to developers. He argues the projects that
result will repay the city in new taxes and spinoff development.
Whatever
his critics say, one key backer Brodie has, and everyone knows it, is Mayor
O'Malley, who re-appointed him after being elected mayor in 1999. Focused on
cutting crime, the new mayor needed an experienced hand at BDC, an agency with
61 employees and a $4.7 million budget.
"I think Jay's done a terrific
job in an extremely tough environment with very little staff, very little
budget," says O'Malley.
The mayor will now decide whether to follow BDC's
advice and choose Robert Johnson's team to develop a 750-room Hilton Hotel near
Camden Yards -- a proposal Brodie himself helped bring to the table. As usual,
BDC's deliberations on the three rival hotel bids occurred in secrecy, and the
usual gripes about that have been heard.
Brodie seems to take the
complaints in stride. There will be plenty of opportunity for public input, he
says, once O'Malley picks a developer. But even with the hotel decision coming
to a head, Brodie has not been consumed by it. For one thing, thoughts of Genie
are never far from his mind.
'The City We Adore'
It was
three years ago when the Brodies received the devastating news. Georgene had
begun to trip when they went ice dancing, then she started to limp. An
orthopedist found nothing, but a neurologist diagnosed her with amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis, the degenerative nerve disorder better known as Lou Gehrig's
disease. Without warning, Genie was dying.
Brodie mused about quitting
his job to be with her. No, she told him emphatically, you love it too much. So
he kept at it but swore off night meetings.
By last fall, Genie had an
increasingly hard time walking, talking, even swallowing. She was still able to
use her hands, though, so she kept painting pottery and note cards at the
couple's latest city home, a modest rowhouse in Wyman Park.
She also kept
scheming. Last September, Jay walked into a Hampden restaurant where, to his
amazement, his wife had organized a surprise party for his 66th birthday. The
two danced as always, him guiding her in the wheelchair.
"Her spirit is
indomitable," he said a few days later. "She's a remarkable woman."
Not
long after, she would need a feeding tube. Then, on Oct. 24, 2002, long before
anyone expected, Genie died. It was a heart attack, not the disease itself. Her
slow decline became a sudden exit.
To help himself cope, Brodie read and
reread poet Dylan Thomas, especially the poem with the comforting lines: "Though
lovers be lost love shall not/ And death shall have no dominion."
He also
gave away CDs of the song she'd written, called "Baltimore -- The City We Adore"
and set to music by their grandson's piano teacher. The lyrics talk of crabs,
Orioles and a "shining harbor" her husband played a hand in creating. The song
ends hopefully: "We are blest to live with such grace/In this great, special
place."
All the memories
A few weeks ago, Jay Brodie drove
to the Mount Pleasant ice rink in Northeast Baltimore at the invitation of
members of an ice dancing troupe. When he walked in, he saw people he hadn't
seen since he and his wife had to leave the ice for good a few years
back.
"I just thought I was going to see some nice skating," he said. "I
didn't think about, shall we say, the more emotional aspects. I was thinking of
the last time we skated.
"It made me realize what a full and wonderful
relationship we had and all the things we were involved in. I'm going to sound a
little maudlin: There is a lot of love out there for Georgene, for both of
us."
At an age when many people retire, Brodie says he has no plans to
quit his job. One of his role models is Walter Sondheim, the legendary civic
leader still active at 95. His wife's death may have underscored life's
fragility, but he says he plans to stick around as long as he can
contribute.
Genie would surely support that. As long as he remembers to
stop and smell the roses.
