When the lower levels of the new garage in downtown Annapolis first opened on Nov. 29, 1972, Mayor Roger W. “Pip” Moyer was there to shake hands with the first customer, grinning for the camera.
Moyer had finally found an answer — at least temporarily — for what to do with all of the cars coming to Annapolis, noting to the Evening Capital that a garage had been discussed since he was in grade school 30 years prior.
Fifty years on from that day, Annapolis is once again grappling with the same issues Moyer thought he had solved. In the five decades since its unveiling, experts have reported the structure that became known as Noah Hillman Garage needs to be repaired or replaced. Mayors of both parties have come and gone. Citizen-led committees have been formed to study the aging building only to be dissolved with little to no progress made.
In late 2020, the city agreed to let a group of private companies tear down the garage and build a bigger and better one in its place. On Monday, six months shy of the 50th anniversary of its opening, the garage will close and be dismantled piece-by-piece. Roughly 14 to 16 months after that, in summer 2023, a new parking structure will rise up on the same footprint at a cost of about $28 million.
“When the garage is complete, it will be an amazing asset with more parking spaces, stormwater controls and environmental features including a solar roof, EV chargers, easier payments, better lighting, and more safety features,” Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley said last month. “This will be a structure that takes Annapolis into the future.”
A search for solutions
Annapolis has had a parking problem practically since the invention of the automobile.
The troubles emerged between the 1940s and ’70s as cars increasingly poured into a city that was transforming from a working waterfront town to one that catered to tourists. A 1960 report on parking claimed “the number of automobiles has more than doubled” between 1950 and 1960.
After the 1951 annexation of outlying areas, which doubled Annapolis’ geography and tripled its population, people began advocating for concrete parking solutions. A 1960 Capital editorial warned: “Every city that does not have adequate parking will wither on the vine and die. And, needs for more parking will become greater every year unless the manufacture of automobiles is discontinued.”
Needless to say, cars didn’t stop rolling off assembly lines. The city didn’t take action for another decade, either, delayed by gridlock on the City Council and resistance from preservation groups like Historic Annapolis, founded in 1952 by Noah Hillman and other Annapolitans intent on retaining the city’s colonial charm.
Some proposed a multistory garage. Others suggested tearing down buildings for parking lots, including multiple proposals to raze the centuries-old Market House.
Hillman, a staunch preservationist who joined the City Council in 1961, fought against another plan to build a garage behind the Calvert House on Randall Street. Hillman would later introduce the ordinance establishing the Historic District downtown, which led to a schism between those who hoped to preserve Annapolis’ history and those who wanted to pivot toward modernity.
The Randall Street proposal was dismissed almost immediately because of the disruption it would cause to the historic buildings on that block, said his son Richard Lazer Hillman, who served one term as mayor of Annapolis from 1981 to 1985.
“The entire inner part of the block [on Randall Street]… has this beautiful grassy garden,” the younger Hillman said. “You can imagine it was not a popular idea with everyone.”
Finally, in the early 1970s, despite his preservationist background, Noah Hillman diverged from his colleagues at Historic Annapolis and supported the city’s efforts to purchase the property behind City Hall to build a garage. The parcel had served as the Gorman Street parking lot since the 1950s.
Construction began in March 1972 on the $1.5 million project — equivalent to $10 million today. Hillman, who chaired the Parking Committee, led the citizens’ group that planned and supervised the construction of the garage. It wasn’t until 1978, six months after Hillman’s death, that his name was finally affixed to it.
Land rich in history
Since the American Revolution, a long line of historic structures has occupied the Hillman garage property.
Among them was the City Tavern owned by George Mann. The stately building overlooking Main Street was the site of several key events in early American history, including visits by George Washington and a gathering of delegates for the Annapolis Convention in the 1780s.
According to Annapolis historian Jane McWilliams’ book “Annapolis, City on the Severn,” the tavern later became the City Hotel before opening as the Colonial Theater in 1902. A terrible fire destroyed the theater in 1919 and the property remained empty for years after the disaster.
Maps of the area show the block’s transformation from an empty plot — with a section marked “ruins” to denote the theater fire — into a maze of sheds and outbuildings with alleys snaking between Main, Conduit, Green and Duke of Gloucester streets.
By 1930, there was a shop surrounded by parking spaces. Later came a Chrysler showroom owned by Greek property owner Steve Foundas.
In the 1950s, a 140-space parking lot named for 19th-century landowner William H. Gorman occupied the land. Gorman’s name would later be attached to the access road that runs parallel to Main Street along the northern border of Hillman Garage and lets out on Conduit Street.
Like others built during that time on Compromise and Dock streets, the lot was meant to draw vehicles off city streets but was met by resistance from emboldened preservationists who resisted the city’s attempts to modernize, such as the ongoing battle to build hotels around City Dock.
“The thinking is that having a more attractive downtown means we’re going to attract more visitors and tourists and so you need more places for them to be able to park if they’re going to be able to enjoy the city,” said Glenn Campbell, senior historian for Historic Annapolis.
Louis Hyatt, a longtime real estate developer who served two terms on the Annapolis City Council, was often at the center of those discussions, including a bitter fight to build a hotel on the Annapolis waterfront in the mid-1960s. Hyatt was a critic of Historic Annapolis who said the organization was trying to stifle “progress” and turn the city into a “museum,” The Capital reported in 1971.
When the city took over the Gorman parking lot to build a garage, “it was a major accomplishment,” said Hyatt, 93.
“It was the start of the city getting involved in structured parking,” Hyatt added. “Parking has always been an issue and it’s never easily solved.”
“As far as I am concerned it went pretty smoothly”
– Original Credit:
Jack Feick, who served as deputy city engineer in the early 1970s, was in charge of the city’s portion of the project, which included coordinating general contractors and demolition of structures on the property. Starrett Corporation, a New York-based construction company, was hired to build the garage.
Feick recalled trucks hauling huge sections of precast concrete through Annapolis’ narrow streets to the construction site where a crane would lift them into place.
“It took a lot of coordination. There were a lot of homes and businesses in that area,” said Feick, who is now in his 80s. “I coordinated the demolition” of structures on the property.
To provide an entrance to the garage from Main Street, The Little Tavern at 135 Main St., was purchased and demolished.
Initial plans called for 500 spaces but that number was later reduced to closer to 400 at the behest of Anne St. Clair Wright, of Historic Annapolis, and other Annapolis preservationists who wanted to keep it hidden behind the tops of the surrounding historic buildings. The new garage will also be shielded by those buildings, preliminary plans show.
There were calls to shrink the building even more but Noah Hillman fought further changes proposed by the preservation society, telling The Capital in 1971, “There’s no basis for their demands. The structure will be in the middle of the block and no buildings will be torn down.”
As for how his position would impact his alliances to Historic Annapolis, Hillman added: “Once the garage is built, they’ll live with it.”
The project was not without problems.
In mid-November 1972, The Capital reported that 50 feet of cement curbing had been mistakenly poured on private property. The error was fixed by Starrett workers and paid for by the company. The blunder was one of the few mistakes that occurred in an otherwise expedient eight-month build, Feick said.
“As far as I am concerned it went pretty smoothly,” he said.
Two weeks later, on Nov. 29, the lower levels of the garage were opened to the public for 25 cents an hour with a $2 daily limit.
It was a four-story, hulking rectangular mass of concrete and brick, wreathed in metal gratings, lurking like a sore thumb behind its more aged and charming counterparts. The entire building opened in January 1973.
The Capital published a photo in November 1972 of a beaming Moyer shaking hands with Tom Alexander, the first garage customer. The garage, Moyer contended, was “a very functional parking garage and you don’t even know it’s there,” according to “City on the Severn.”
It wasn’t until April 1978 that the garage was named for Noah Hillman.
In the months leading up to his death from congestive heart failure in October 1977, the City Council honored Hillman, who became known as the father of the Historic District. Alderwoman Barbara Neustadt wanted to give him a street name. It was Mayor John Apostol’s idea to name the garage after Hillman, Richard Hillman said.
The elder Hillman was in such poor health at the time that an alderman, James J. Stilwell, had to come to his house to deliver the good news.
“Stilwell sees my father is suffering, so he gives him the news, shakes his hand and leaves,” Richard Hillman said. “We go in and say, ‘Dad isn’t that great?'”
Hillman, in a nod to the city’s construction of a nearby sewage treatment plant at the time, replied “Thank God I wasn’t chairman of the Sewage Committee.”
Years of inaction
For the last decade or more, a battle has been raging over what to do with Hillman Garage.
Noah Hillman’s legacy, now just months away from completing its fifth decade in operation, is on its final legs.
The garage’s brick facade is cracked from exposure to the elements and plastered over by periodic repairs. Rust-colored water stains the walls and pools on uneven pavement. In a city with some of the most stringent stormwater controls in the country, rain runs off the building from drain pipes and trickles untreated into the Chesapeake Bay.
The building is nine years beyond what Feick and others thought its lifetime of 40 years would be. It’s a decade removed from when inspectors warned it might collapse if it wasn’t fixed.
Periodic renovations, including a $2 million redecking project in 1998 that added about 25 spaces, have kept the building functional. But the elevators haven’t worked in years. The rusting outer stairwells aren’t much better off.
When Mayor Ellen Moyer was in office from 2001 to 2009, the Democrat said she knew the clock was ticking on the garage. She focused on addressing sea-level rise and other projects because it was still within its life expectancy. Moyer’s administration did take steps to landscape the areas around the garage and commissioned a mural to be painted on a concrete retaining wall nearby.
“We knew it was going to need to be replaced. That was a known factor,” Moyer said.
Ann Berger has owned the historic Georgian House on Duke of Gloucester since 2005 and served on several commissions tasked with solving the Hillman problem.
“Since I’ve lived here there’s been three or four garage committees that I’ve sat on and nothing ever comes of it,” Berger said.
For Mike Pantelides, a Republican who served one term as mayor from 2013 to 2017, Hillman was among three capital projects he planned to tackle, including rebricking Main Street and replacing the City Dock bulkhead. But by the time Pantelides successfully replaced the bulkhead in 2016 and turned his attention to the other projects, there was no consensus on how to go about replacing the garage, he said.
“From my point of view, it was always on the radar,” said Pantelides, who would be unseated by Buckley in 2017. “There was just no political will on the council to do it.”
Alderman Ross Arnett, a Democrat who’s served Ward 8 since 2007, had a different view.
“We can patch, patch, patch but we’re gonna end up spending as much money patching as we are to replace [the garage],” Arnett said, pointing to a feasibility study conducted the year he was seated that found the garage was nearing the end of its life but might be extended slightly with periodic repairs.
Under Buckley’s watch in 2019, the City Dock Action Committee was formed with nearly 100 residents, experts and stakeholders. The group recommended the garage be rebuilt in conjunction with a larger redevelopment of City Dock, the downtown waterfront area. Berger joined the committee in hopes of finally finding solutions to the crumbling garage she can see out her back window.
She recalled a previous owner of the Georgian House, a military widow named Dot Cummins who fought the garage’s construction for years.
Cummins extracted concessions from the city including the construction of a brick wall at the back of her property that helped block the view of the garage from her house. She also received a lifetime free parking spot in the garage, said Berger, who wasn’t afforded the same benefits when she purchased the home.
“I keep telling them, where’s my garage spot?” she said.
A new garage finally emerges
In December 2020, after months of considering proposals, Buckley announced his administration had chosen Annapolis Mobility and Resilience Partners, a collection of 10 companies, some with Maryland and Annapolis ties, to build the new garage.
Using a report produced by the City Dock Action Committee, the city unveiled a plan to both rebuild Hillman Garage and install climate resilience infrastructure at City Dock for a combined $63 million.
Unlike the original garage, which the city paid for with bonds, AMRP will pay the city a one-time fee of around $25 million. In exchange, AMRP will control all aspects of the garage until the 2050s, including collecting all of the parking revenue from the garage plus revenue from hundreds of parking spaces in the downtown area. It would then pay roughly $1 million annually to help fund the city’s transit system.
The city is expected to use the one-time fee to pay down a portion of the $35.3 million City Dock redevelopment. The rest of the funding is slated to come from state grants. The City Dock redevelopment, set to begin sometime next year, would eliminate nearly all parking spaces on Dock Street and Market Space in favor of green space and pedestrian areas. It will also feature flood barriers, and stormwater pumps to combat rising sea levels.
Developers have touted the supersized 590-space garage with gateless entry and exits, electric vehicle charging stations, solar roofs and extensive stormwater controls.
Buckley sees the largest infrastructure project in city history as a defining feature of his second term, one that will set his legacy after he leaves office. The redeveloped City Dock would open in his final year in office.
“I want people to say, he’s the best mayor we’ve ever had. Because he did those things,” Buckley told The Capital in October, days before he won a historic electoral victory. “He didn’t just talk about them. Even if they were hard, he did them.”
Berger has attended meetings, scribbled down copious notes and watched with apprehension as Buckley’s plan has unfolded. Some have criticized the city for giving away one of the most consistent forms of revenue outside of property taxes. Others have decried a perceived lack of communication from the city about the project.
She might not be as combative as Dot Cummins was 50 years ago, but she’s ready if trouble arises, Berger said. She has taken photos of every inch of her 275-year-old home. When demolition begins she’ll be watching for cracks and other damage from vibrations caused by the construction equipment. Still, she’s mostly upbeat about the prospect of a new garage, she said.
After all, something is finally being done to fix up the building. After years of debate, the building will once again be anointed Noah Hillman Garage when it reopens.
Annapolis has, for the moment, found a solution to its downtown parking problem. The legacy of the father of the Historic District will be born anew.
