Walter Sondheim Jr.; Helped Develop, Integrate Baltimore
From News Services and Staff Reports
Friday, February 16, 2007; Page B07
Walter Sondheim Jr., 98, the civic and business leader who championed Baltimore's downtown renaissance and guided the city through the desegregation of its schools as school board chairman in the mid-1950s, died Feb. 15 at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. He had pneumonia.
Mr. Sondheim was a famously modest man who in 1999 was named one of the most important and influential Marylanders of the 20th century.
As onetime chairman of the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency, he was considered one of the architects of downtown development starting in the late 1950s. As an early member of the Greater Baltimore Committee, he pushed for projects such as the Charles Center, the Maryland Science Center and the Inner Harbor, which helped fuel the revitalization of the dying industrial city.
Mr. Sondheim was president of the Baltimore school board in the 1950s when it decided to desegregate a prestigious engineering course at Polytechnic Institute in response to black protests, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court mandated desegregation in public school systems across the country.
After the Supreme Court's decision, Mr. Sondheim and the school board decided to comply as quickly as possible, while many major cities employed tactics to delay compliance. Baltimore was the first district south of the Mason-Dixon line to comply with the order.
Mr. Sondheim was a Baltimore native and graduated in 1929 from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He then joined the old Hochschild Kohn department store, where his father worked, eventually becoming a vice president. He served in the Navy during World War II.
He held a number of civic posts after his retirement, including president of the state school board. He was a close adviser to William Donald Schaefer (D), a former Baltimore mayor, Maryland governor and state comptroller. Schaefer appointed Mr. Sondheim in the late 1980s to the Governor's Commission on School Performance, which released a blueprint for school reforms.
His wife, Janet Blum Sondheim, a former dancer with the Denishawn modern dance company, died in 1992.
Survivors include two children, John W. Sondheim and Ellen Dankert, both of Baltimore; two granddaughters; and a great-granddaughter.
