Inner cities are full of empty buildings. Universities are coming.

On a prominent corner of Pennsylvania Avenue, in a once-ostentatious building that once housed the Newseum, sits the 10-story, $650 million Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center just opened in Washington. I’ll say right away: it’s not architecture for the ages, but it’s an interesting, high-end model of an urban quad and a good example of how struggling city centers find a glimmer of hope as satellite campuses.

In design jargon, the term is ‘adaptive reuse’, which is the same story as turning empty office towers into apartment buildings. Graduate students from Hopkins’ business school and its government and international studies programs, among others, now occupy the space where an old satellite and a news helicopter from KXAS-TV in Texas once dangled from the Newseum ceiling. David Rockwell and his Rockwell Group, the New York-based theater and hospitality specialists, have converted the center’s atrium into a beautiful, sun-drenched, wide-open complex of classrooms with terraces and breakout areas.

However, universities like Hopkins are not the ultimate panacea for America’s inner-city problems, mainly because they don’t pay property taxes like for-profit corporations. The city center is still struggling. WeWork, which currently leases more office space than any other company in the United States, filed for bankruptcy this month. The number of visitors to theaters, museums and many cultural attractions is still low, post-pandemic.

That said, residents are coming back. When the Covid-19 crisis broke out, experts were quick to note how many city dwellers, especially the wealthier ones, were fleeing to the countryside, and suggested the move could be permanent. It turns out that the reverse may be true: according to a new studyby Paul Levy and a team from Philadelphia’s Center City District, more residents now live in inner cities across America than before Covid.

Here in Washington, the number of residents is up 114 percent compared to early 2020 numbers, the survey shows. It’s also in downtown San Francisco, and downtown Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, even Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

I realize that these numbers come from just one study, conducted by a downtown community organization. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has taken the New York City subway during the midweek rush lately. Inner cities are not yet back to what they were, but their obituaries were clearly premature.

They change, as they always have. I remember a conversation with a developer in the spring of 2020, just after Covid cleared the streets, that stuck with me because developers, the big ones anyway, deal with bigger risks and have to look at the long term. This developer’s properties had already suffered losses and the forecasts were bleak at the time, but he was quite level-headed when he estimated that we wouldn’t have an honest, actionable picture of where cities really stood before mid-2025.

According to that timeline, we are just over halfway to enlightenment.

So what seems familiar at this point?

The University of California, Los Angeles, recently launched a vacant office building in the center of the city. Saint Francis College in New York signed a 30-year lease for an office tower above a Macy’s in Brooklyn. The University of Louisville in Kentucky received an office building in downtown Louisville as a gift. And in San Francisco, All kinds of things are said about schools possibly being the magic elixir that saves the inner city from urban ruin.

Not that property taxes aren’t a big and controversial issue, especially when it comes to well-endowed universities, but campuses do bring other revenue to city coffers.

This relocation of schools to the city center is of course not a new phenomenon. In the case of Hopkins, the Baltimore-based research university already operated a satellite campus in DC. Before the pandemic, the school had begun looking for a more central location that could bring together several graduate programs at Hopkins under one roof, in the heart of the city. .

In 2019, an opportunity arose when the Newseum decided to sell its building. Founded by the nonprofit Freedom Forum in 1997 in Rosslyn, Virginia, the Newseum moved to Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008, with an admirable ambition to do for the Fourth Estate what the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space and Natural History museums , on the nearby Washington Mall, have done for Amelia Earhart, the Apollo moon missions and dinosaurs.

Designed by James Polshek (New Yorkers may know him best from the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History), the Newseum was the architectural equivalent of a bold newspaper headline from the street. It contained the text of the First Amendment engraved on a four-story, 50-ton pink marble tablet attached to the noisy steel-and-glass facade.

The interior, installed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, was also a cacophony: packed with galleries, theaters, interactive kiosks and artifacts. A giant wall of LED screens showed newspaper clippings and videos.

Props to the Freedom Forum for forcing Washington politicians to pass a giant tablet containing the First Amendment as they drove down Pennsylvania Avenue. The museum hosted a number of excellent exhibitions and programs.

But the Newseum was not Polshek’s finest hour. In a neighborhood full of exceptional urban architecture, the building looked all the more graceless next to Arthur Erickson’s monumental Canadian Embassy and across the street from John Russell Pope’s magisterial National Gallery of Art and IM Pei’s East Building.

At $477 million, the Newseum also cost far more than its original budget and opened three years later than planned amid severe economic downturns. It charged visitors $25 to enter in a city where some of the world’s largest museums are free.

After just over a decade, the Newseum, like many of the newspapers it anchored, had to close its doors and put its building up for sale, donating the First Amendment tablet to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

With money from Michael R. Bloomberg, Hopkins’ largest donor, the university was able to purchase the building for $372 million and then spend another $275 million on renovations.

Ennead, the company founded by Polshek, who died last year, was hired to work with SmithGroup and redo the exterior. Richard Olcott, the partner in charge, recently told me that he had received marching orders from Hopkins to architecturally rename the building. At the same time, he said, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which always has the final say on design in downtown Washington, told him, “We had to be a better neighbor.”

The new design partially wrapped the facade in woven bands of pink Tennessee marble – the marble matching the exteriors of nearby buildings. A giant glassy indentation on the exterior by Polshek that allowed views into the interior – he called it a “window on the world” – was filled in, adding thousands of new square meters to the interior for a library, café, classrooms and terraces with views to the Capitol.

Now the Hopkins center can conjure up from the outside an awkward fourth-grader in the front row of a class photo: well-behaved, eager to fit in — still not entirely comfortable in the environment.

More meaningful changes took place in the building’s atrium. The Rockwell Groupin collaboration with Ennead, had to perform a magic trick of sorts: turn a shoebox into an open, flexible, campus-like quad where students hang out and want to interact up, down and across the atrium.

Skylights were opened, floors leveled and the video screen wall removed. I think it’s helpful that the Rockwell Group specializes in choreographing theatrical spaces. Bridges, now suspended from the center’s ceiling, cross the new atrium, where lounges flow down like rice paddies from the upper floors. A tiered stand, like a mini amphitheater, is called “the Beach,” after a popular stretch of lawn on the university’s flagship campus in Baltimore. It offers everyone who uses it the seating equivalent of the coveted corner booths in restaurants. On one side of the building, a huge quasi-treehouse with classrooms flourishes, the trunk of which is a staircase.

Walnut paneling and plenty of eclectic sofas and tables soften some of the hard, corporate edges. A 375-seat theater, open to outsiders, will serve as a lecture and concert venue for music students at the Hopkins Peabody Institute. There will be a restaurant with outdoor seating, along with a public art gallery, both of which are also intended to draw Washington residents and assorted outsiders to downtown, weaving the campus with the city.

When I recently visited, students peered over the bridges, sunbathed on the terraces and filled the break rooms, nestling in library carrels whose new floor-to-ceiling windows look out over Pope’s great dome and toward the Washington Mall.

The atmosphere was serious, but cold. You could imagine that the center, when it becomes full, will become a hub in the city center.

Pessimistic talk continues to cloud the future of American cities. Like I said, cities are evolving post-Covid.

Some of the future changes may not be so bad.