A former assistant, Lainy LeBow-Sachs, confirmed the death, the Associated Press reported.
New York had its Fiorello h. LaGuardia. Chicago has the Daleys. And Baltimore had William Donald Schaefer: the name on the park benches, trucks garbage, buildings of offices, construction sites, horse racing at Pimlico - and on the psyche of the Baltimoreans in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a sort of disappointment when he became Governor: they called the Mayor of Maryland.
Mr. Schaefer, a Democrat who crushed his opponents with up to 94 percent of the ballots, was one of the longest runways in American politics. After 16 years as a municipal councillor, he won four mandates of Mayor from 1971 to 1987. two terms as Governor from 1987 to 1995. and two terms as controller of the State, from 1999 to 2007. His defeat in a 2006 for his re-election bid was his first in more than a half-century.
"Bawlamer", as say native, was a city of seedy, beer and shot factory when he became mayor. There were riots in the 1960s, and went to residents and businesses. Its core of the 18th century was a disaster of rotting piers and warehouses crumbling. Granular townhouses and dilapidated buildings lined the streets of downtown. Neighbourhoods evil with the poverty, unemployment, drugs and crime.
Its methods are unorthodox. He sold 500 buildings abandoned for $1 each to urban settlers and hundreds of commercial shells for $100 each to businessmen. It bureaucratic twisted arms for moving development projects. He harassed the Government authorities for housing and transportation of money, solicits private donations, has attracted new companies with concessions and joined internationally acclaimed architects.
It was demolished and rebuilt whole districts. There the crews of the city to save the lintels, fireplaces and marble of abandoned buildings and sell them for money for the restoration. He pushed the festivals summer and theatres of the community. He jawboned professional stay put, or come to town sports teams. Driving around at night looking for potholes, trash, troublemakers and drug pushers and obtained concrete results.
At the end of its mandate at the Town Hall, Mr. Schaefer has been praised for turning the eighth largest city of in the United States in a model of urban renaissance and national tourism. There are new businesses, parks, auditoriums, highways and public transit lines, a new line of horizon hotels and office towers, a new Congress centre and a pentagonal 28-story World Trade Center designed by Ieoh Ming Pei.
The centrepiece was the signature of Mr. Schaefer Harborplace, a pavilion of glass of the waterfront restaurants and shops by James Rouse, the developer of South Street Seaport of New York and Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston. He had cobblestone walks, a National Aquarium and, on the water, sailboats, a historic frigate, a submarine vintage and a Chesapeake Bay skipjack. He had 18 million visitors in its first year, 1980-81.
The transformation is difficult to complete. The city economy and image improved, but critical, said that the lives of many citizens did not, that schools had declined, and that poverty, unemployment, crime and drugs had not mastered. The Mayor was widely vilified as a tyrant who favored the business and himself promoted with clownish gimmicks. (When the aquarium was not completed in time, he jumped as promised in the pool of door seal a Victorian striped swimsuit and hooking a duck.)
But activists insisted its improvements were substantive and had brought a vital sense of pride. When he became Governor in 1987, the Baltimore Sun indicated that Mr. Schaefer has "changed the way in which the city felt on itself".
William Donald Schaefer was born in Baltimore, November 2, 1921, the son of William Henry and Tululu Irene Schaefer Skipper. He attended the public schools and graduated from Baltimore City College in 1939 and the Faculty of law of the University of Baltimore in 1942. He joined the army in the second world war became an officer and oversaw the hospitals in England and Europe.
He practiced real estate law in Baltimore after the war and joined groups of citizens put emphasis on the housing and urban development. It was heavy, with a long face and eyes solemn and painfully shy as a young man. He never married and lived his entire life with his mother, until his death in 1983, in the plain two Baltimore row houses. After becoming Governor at age 65, his friend since childhood, Hilda Mae fouinards, served as his official hostess at the Manor House of the Governor of Annapolis. She died in 1999.
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