A longtime leader behind revitalization efforts in Baltimore, particularly its Inner Harbor, is stepping down.

Laurie Schwartz, the president of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore since 2005, announced her retirement Friday. The move takes effect in June.

Schwartz, 71, leaves behind a legacy of projects in the Inner Harbor that range from the creation of Pierce’s Park next to the Columbus Center, to the redesign and restoration of Rash Field Park, to the introduction to Baltimore of “Mr. Trash Wheel,” a vessel designed to pick up debris that carried into the Inner Harbor by storm runoff.

With its googly eyes and its own Twitter account, the environmentally friendly trash wheel — part of the Healthy Harbor Initiative, a Waterfront Partnership project — took on an affable personality and an international following of its own.

Its popularity paved the way for two equally diligent imitators, “Professor” Trash Wheel and “Gwynnda the Good Wheel of the West.” All three are still at work.

“The fact that Laurie was able to see that concept and embrace it is part of what makes her special,” said Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman of the colleague she has known for more than a decade. “The trash wheels aren’t just something we needed to have. They showed we could have fun cleaning up, and they could become a piece of our identity and of our city. They’re effective, and they’re quirky — like Baltimore.”

Schwartz says she didn’t start out in Baltimore with any grand vision.

“When I came, it was such an incredibly exciting time in Baltimore,” she said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun on Thursday. “[William Donald] Schaefer was mayor. The Inner Harbor was being developed; it wasn’t open yet. The approach to revitalizing communities was changing. People felt good; they felt optimistic about the city. I wanted to be engaged in what was happening.”

She was between her first and second years of graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park in the early 1970s when she volunteered to work for the city’s housing department.

“I just wanted to get my foot in the door and learn how the city worked,” she says. After about a month, they began to pay her. She was assigned to projects in Fells Point and Federal Hill and helped work on renovation projects in the Oliver and Broadway East neighborhoods.

“I was very lucky to be assigned to that kind of interesting work and to be part of the decision-making progress,” Schwartz said.

She soon bought a dilapidated, city-owned vacant house on Guilford Street in Lower Charles Village and embarked on a long restoration project of her new home. “That solidified my commitment to the city,” she says.

After Schaefer tasked her with preparing a strategy to reverse the decline of Charles Street, Schwartz’s work led to the creation of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, a nonprofit that works with businesses and government to identify needs and shape policies meant to strengthen the economic vitality of the downtown area. She served as president for 15 years.

Over the next decade or so, Schwartz served as deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development under Mayor Martin O’Malley, worked as a consultant for nonprofit entities in Baltimore, including Catholic Charities and Coppin State University, and served as a consultant with a group of business and property owners tasked with exploring means of making the Inner Harbor a greater strength for the city.

That effort led to the creation of the Waterfront Partnership. Schwartz has served as its president since it was formed in 2005.

Those who know Schwartz say a blend of qualities has characterized her decades of work: a preference for laboring out of the spotlight, a gift for forging partnerships between private and public entities, and a relentlessness that helps her turn stakeholders’ visions into a reality.

“She’s a good listener, but she’s a good facilitator and a strategic thinker,” said Tim O’Donald, the board chair of the Waterfront Partnership who has worked with Schwartz for 17 years. “She’s able to look at the problem, the issue, the need — however you would define that — then to come up with plausible solutions. And even then she’s not just sold on one solution. She’s open to feedback from all sides.”

Schwartz says she’s proud of the Inner Harbor’s growth over the decades into a hub of commerce, activity, and interaction, not to mention an entity that “put Baltimore on the international map.” She concedes it has deteriorated in recent years, however. Schwartz attributes its smaller crowds and less festive environment not to local lawmakers but to changes in ownership.

Still, Schwartz said, it’s a “very exciting time again” now that the Waterfront Partnership and other agencies are involved in planning such projects as the elevation of the promenade — the pedestrian sidewalk that links Inner Harbor properties.

She hopes it’s part of a reawakening of the pride she believes most Baltimoreans felt when she began her career.

“I am especially proud of some of the things I have had a hand in, particularly helping to create so many parks and public places around the waterfront for Baltimoreans and others, to use and enjoy.”

Have a news tip? Contact Jonathan M. Pitts at jonpitts@baltsun.com.