Their first home at 436 Grindall Street in Federal Hill—Struever has never forgotten the number—was purchased with a $10,000 loan from his mother. They eventually rehabbed three more in the group and created a grassy knoll between them, naming it Chandler’s Yard in tribute to the ship chandlers who had lived nearby. But Struever soon realized that if they were going to be successful flipping old houses, they needed to revitalize the neighborhood’s commercial life—jump-start the kind of businesses, restaurants, and shops that make urban neighborhoods convenient, attractive, and fun for pioneering young home buyers.

“Our banker told me someone needed to do something with the Cross Street Market and reopen the nearby storefronts,” Struever says. “Otherwise, nothing would sell. [But] I didn’t have any money. Then he told me he’d loan me the money to do it. We eventually bought 40 storefronts, and I’ve been borrowing money ever since.” Struever and his partners launched the Sundae Times ice cream parlor on the south side of Cross Street, a children’s bookstore, and a gourmet cheese stall in the market.

Their most successful venture proved to be a bar and live-music venue called Hammerjacks at the corner of Cross and South Charles streets. “We sold more cases of Budweiser than any bar east of the Mississippi,” Struever says with a bit of pride.

Ever restless and adventurous (Struever has been known to kayak across the harbor to meetings), he quickly turned his attention to more audacious projects, such as redeveloping Clipper Mill, the former sail factory on the Jones Falls. Inevitably, as with the Tindeco, Canton Cove, and American Can Company projects, he saw value where few dared to tread. He also displayed a knack for marrying private investments with public subsidies and tax credits, which continues to this day. In the process, he reshaped the city’s deindustrialized harbor and decaying riverfront mills into national models of adapted renewal.

Struever didn’t invent the exposed piping, beam, and brick aesthetic, nor the modern commercial, office, and residential district, as Baltimore architect and former Struever collaborator Klaus Philipsen points out. That had been done previously in places such as SoHo, San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square, and the docks of East London. But Struever convinced an often-timid Baltimore, Philipsen recalls, that it could be done here. “I arrived in Baltimore [from Germany] about when Bill did, and the city was in transition, and not in a good way,” Philipsen says. “He and his team were enterprising, the first to use adaptive reuse principles. He understood the power of design and value in preserving these assets. It’s much easier to go to the suburbs and build where nothing else exists.”

Struever’s mentors included the also famously rumpled, civic-minded developer James Rouse, who built Harborplace, Cross Keys, and, from whole cloth, Columbia. Ted Rouse, James’ son, became the fourth partner of Struever’s team early on. Not that Struever was in concert with James Rouse on everything. “We disagreed over Columbia,” he says. “Why create something out there when you already have the density and ingredients and creative energy of city life? I was never interested in the suburbs. It’s fake. Nothing’s authentic.”

Another mentor was Walter Sondheim, the former chairman of the school board who spearheaded the desegregation of Baltimore’s public schools following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Struever, too, sat on the Baltimore City Board of Education for a period, among numerous boards over the years. He also practiced what he preached, living in the city and sending his daughters to public schools.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t think anyone can deny the redevelopment of the Can Company and Canton waterfront and the rest were thoughtfully done,” says Abell Foundation president Robert Embry Jr., reflecting on Struever’s landmark accomplishments. “He’s a city treasure. I grew up in Northeast Baltimore, and I’d never seen the water there as a kid. It was industrial. There was no reason to go down there.”

“It is much easier to go to the suburbs and build where nothing else exists.”

There were hiccups along the way—a failed effort to develop the Port Liberty area and the early ’90s recession took their tolls—but eventually the success of Struever Bros., Eccles, and Rouse enticed the celebrated developer to look beyond the beltway to places such as Wilmington, Delaware; Durham, North Carolina; and Providence, Rhode Island—even Boston and Fenway Park. And then, leveraged to the hilt as the financial crisis hit in 2007, the whole company came tumbling down.

Projects such as the State Center, Harbor East, and the completion of Brewers Hill had to be handed off to other developers. The Olmstead, a planned 12-story building on St. Paul Street in Charles Village, stayed a fenced-in hole in the ground. Lawsuits for failure to pay contractors and vendors and loans piled up across multiple states. Struever never declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which would’ve been the easier and personally less costly route, instead spending the subsequent half-decade mitigating the damage and working out of the mess. The formation of Cross Street Partners enabled him to begin again with consulting projects, but the heavy losses essentially sidelined him until recently in terms of full-blown development work.

“A lot of sleepless nights,” Struever says. “We employed about 400 people, and there were hundreds of others affected, obviously. That’s what keeps you up, trying to figure a way out.”