Dundalk), the largest waterfront steel mill in the world; and the 70-year-old General Motors auto/truck assembly plant on Broening Highway in the southeast city would negatively impact the quality of life in the city of Baltimore and add to the city's unemployment rate. His administration turned to tourism as a possible alternative. He pushed for and saw built a new Baltimore Convention Center along West Pratt Street between South Charles, Sharp and Howard Streets in downtown Baltimore in 1979, enlarged again in the 1990s to keep up with expanding and larger competition for the burgeoning nationwide convention business; as well as the opening of Baltimore's famed "Harborplace", festival marketplace pavilions by shopping center developer and urban visionary James Rouse along the north and west shores of the old "Basin" (Inner Harbor) at East Pratt Street along South Calvert Street, replacing the former small grassy central "Pratt and Light" triangular Samuel Smith Park with its bronze statue of the old brave "Defender of Baltimore" (from the British attack at the Battle of Baltimore crafted at the 1914 Star Spangled Banner Centennial from the War of 1812) and its surrounding "temporary" Light Street parking lots from the last waterfront "urban renewal" project of the Mayor Thomas J. D'Alesandro, Jr. (1903–1987, served 1947–1959) administration from the late 1940s. Dubbed "America's Best Mayor" at the time by several national magazine stories, Mayor Schaefer was hailed for transforming a deteriorating city into a hub of national tourism, although the groundwork and the original vision for the Inner Harbor project in the early 1960s to succeed the previous Charles Center downtown renewal of 1958–1970 had first been foreseen and crafted two mayoral administrations earlier under progressive/liberal Republican mayor and former governor of Maryland Theodore R. McKeldin (1900–1974, served 1943–1947 and 1963–1967), who was eventually recognized by having the redeveloped plaza facing the new "festival marketplaces" at Pratt, Light and Calvert Streets renamed for him. With new businesses, new hotels, a new National Aquarium and the new convention center, Baltimore had been revived. Harborplace had 18 million visitors its first year, 1980–81. In 1984, Esquire magazine named Schaefer "the best mayor in America". A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago ranked Schaefer as the twentieth-best American big-city mayor to have served between the years 1820 and 1993. Colts leave Schaefer constantly battled