Charm City — where the Inner Harbor's National Aquarium and the USS Constellation anchor a working waterfront that still processes 40 million tons of cargo a year, Lexington Market has operated continuously since 1782, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab arrives steamed with Old Bay seasoning from the boats that work the same estuary described by John Smith in 1608, and the Walters Art Museum houses 55,000 works free of charge to anyone who walks in
Baltimore (580,000; metro 2.9 million) is Maryland's largest city and a major seaport at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay — the nation's seventh-largest port by tonnage, handling coal, cars, sugar, and Baltimore's famous Old Bay-spiced crab hauls from the same estuary that sustained the Indigenous Piscataway and Nanticoke peoples for thousands of years before European contact. The Inner Harbor (redeveloped 1980s from derelict docklands) anchors tourism with the National Aquarium (one of the country's finest), the Maryland Science Center, and the historic USS Constellation (the last Civi…
The founding of Baltimore in 1729 as a tobacco-shipping port made it the economic hub of the Maryland Colony within decades — by 1797, it was the second-largest city in the United States. The Battle of Baltimore (September 12–15, 1814, War of 1812) — in which a British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour failed to take the city — inspired Francis Scott Key (watching from a US ship under British detention in the harbour) to write 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on the morning of September 14, 1814. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O, opened 1827 in Baltimore) was the first comm…