Baltimore Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• 
  Camden Yards / Oriole Park

  Ahead of you rises a ballpark that quietly rewrote the rules of how America builds sports stadiums. Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992, and in doing so launched an architectural revolution.

• 
  Fort McHenry

  This star-shaped fort at the harbor's mouth saved Baltimore in 1814 and gave America its national anthem. Fort McHenry was completed in 1803 on a peninsula where the Patapsco River meets the harbor, designed in the classic star shape to allow defenders to fire in every direction without creating blind spots.

• 
  USS Constellation

  Look at the last surviving Civil War–era warship in the United States Navy. The USS Constellation was launched in 1854 at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, a sloop-of-war built on the traditional lines of wooden sailing warships that had dominated naval combat for centuries.

• 
  Penn Station

  Penn Station fills your view, one of the finest remaining Beaux-Arts railroad stations in the United States and Baltimore's gateway to the Eastern Seaboard for over a century. Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station was completed in 1911, designed by the firm of Kenneth Murchison, who was a student of the great Beaux-Arts architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart and who brought the full vocabulary of the style — monumental scale, Roman arched windows, elaborate ornamental stonework, and a grand vaulted waiting room — to this commission.

• 
  Fells Point

  Your walk begins in Baltimore's oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood, the birthplace of its maritime identity. Fells Point was established in 1763 by William Fell, a Quaker ship carpenter from Lancashire, England, who recognized that this stretch of shoreline offered the deepest natural anchorage on the upper Chesapeake Bay.

All 60 stops

• Fort McHenry (South Baltimore / Locust Point)

  This star-shaped fort at the harbor's mouth saved Baltimore in 1814 and gave America its national anthem.

• Fells Point (Fells Point)

  Your walk begins in Baltimore's oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood, the birthplace of its maritime identity.

• USS Constellation (Inner Harbor)

  Look at the last surviving Civil War–era warship in the United States Navy.

• Camden Yards / Oriole Park (Inner Harbor / Downtown)

  Ahead of you rises a ballpark that quietly rewrote the rules of how America builds sports stadiums.

• Inner Harbor Piers (Inner Harbor)

  Few American waterfronts have been copied as often as this one, right down to the brick promenade beneath your feet.

• Flag House & Star-Spangled Banner Museum (Downtown / Little Italy)

  Here in this Federal-period house, Mary Pickersgill stitched the flag that would become the national anthem's namesake.

• Shot Tower (Downtown / Old Town)

  A red brick column tapers 234 feet above you, finished in 1828 as the tallest structure in the United States.

• Lloyd Street Synagogue (Downtown / Old Town)

  Ionic columns and a pedimented facade greet you here, marking the oldest surviving synagogue in Maryland and the third oldest in the United States.

• President Street Station (Downtown / Harbor East)

  This modest brick depot marks the ground where American blood first spilled in the Civil War.

• Peale Museum (Downtown)

  This neoclassical building, raised in 1814, was the first in America built purely to be a museum.

• Baltimore City Hall (Downtown)

  A cast-iron dome rises 227 feet above you, crowning one of the finest Second Empire buildings in the country.

• Battle Monument (Downtown)

  Rising eighteen feet in front of you is the first public monument erected in the United States to commemorate a military battle.

• Lexington Market (Downtown / West Baltimore)

  Notice the aroma of Old Bay seasoning that has drawn Baltimoreans here since 1782.

• Davidge Hall (Downtown / Medical District)

  Picture a circular skylight above you, once opened to lower bodies into the room below for dissection.

• Mount Clare Museum House (Carroll Park / Southwest Baltimore)

  Five symmetrical bays of brick face you here, the oldest surviving Georgian-period mansion in Baltimore, quietly outlasting the city that grew up around it.

• B&O Railroad Museum (Mount Clare / Southwest Baltimore)

  Here in 1828 the first rails of American commerce were laid from this very spot, setting the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on its course to…

• Irish Railroad Workers Museum (West Baltimore)

  Your route passes two restored rowhouses on Lemmon Street that safeguard the story of Irish immigrant labor.

• H.L. Mencken House (Hollins Hill / West Baltimore)

  This modest rowhouse on Hollins Street held one man for seventy-three years, from 1883 until his death in 1956.

• Hollins Market (Hollins Hill / West Baltimore)

  Cast-iron arches and worn brick front you here, a market shed that has anchored Hollins Hill since 1838.

• Edgar Allan Poe House (West Baltimore)

  This tiny brick rowhouse is where a penniless Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1833 to 1835, writing his earliest successful stories.

• Westminster Hall & Poe's Grave (Downtown / University of Maryland)

  Beneath your feet lies one of American literature's most unresolved deaths, its cause still argued 175 years later.

• Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption (Downtown / Mount Vernon)

  Ahead rises a domed basilica whose architect also designed the US Capitol, the first Catholic cathedral built in the United States.

• Peabody Library (Mount Vernon)

  Look up through six stories of black-and-gold cast-iron balconies to a skylight nine stories above your head.

• Garrett-Jacobs Mansion (Mount Vernon)

  Notice how an entire city block is consumed by this Gilded Age palazzo, the largest private residence ever built in Baltimore, built to express the…

• Belvedere Hotel (Mount Vernon)

  Thirteen floors of red brick and limestone rise above you, crowned with copper, once the social center of Baltimore and a stage for the most…

• Maryland Historical Society (Mount Vernon)

  Your tour arrives at one of the oldest historical societies in the United States, home to an extraordinary collection of Maryland and American material culture.

• Billie Holiday Statue / Pennsylvania Avenue (Upton / Pennsylvania Avenue Corridor)

  Picture Pennsylvania Avenue decades ago, alive with clubs and theaters built by African American Baltimoreans who made this corridor their own.

• Orchard Street Church (West Baltimore)

  Here on Orchard Street stands a church that anchored Baltimore's free Black community through the antebellum era.

• McKim Free School (Old Town / East Baltimore)

  In front of you sits a modest Federal-style building that, in 1833, became the first free school for Black children in Baltimore.

• Great Blacks in Wax Museum (East Baltimore)

  Here in East Baltimore stands a museum unlike any other on Earth, entirely devoted to African American history and achievement.

• Frederick Douglass–Isaac Myers Maritime Park (Fells Point)

  This stretch of waterfront once echoed with caulking mallets, the same trade that trained Frederick Douglass and later gave rise, under Isaac Myers, to the…

• Douglass Place (Fells Point / Old Town)

  This quiet stretch of Fells Point streets is where an eight-year-old boy named Frederick Bailey arrived around 1826 to begin a life that would remake…

• Public School 103 / Frederick Douglass School (Upton / West Baltimore)

  Public School 103, later renamed the Frederick Douglass School, rises in front of you, a building that embodies the hard-won educational achievements of Baltimore's African…

• Read's Drug Store (Downtown)

  Picture this counter years ahead of Greensboro, North Carolina, quietly serving Black and white customers side by side without a single sit-in.

• Holocaust Memorial (Downtown)

  Your visit brings you to Baltimore's Holocaust Memorial, honoring the six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945 and the…

• Katyn Memorial (Inner Harbor)

  The Katyn Memorial in front of you confronts one of the most systematically concealed war crimes of the twentieth century.

• Immigration Pier / Locust Point (Locust Point / South Baltimore)

  Between 1868 and 1914, more than one million European immigrants first touched American soil right here at this Locust Point pier.

• Domino Sugar Sign (South Baltimore / Inner Harbor)

  Domino Sugars glows in red neon above the refinery in front of you, one of Baltimore's most beloved industrial landmarks and one of the most…

• Federal Hill (Federal Hill)

  Below this summit the whole of Baltimore's Inner Harbor opens out, a natural high point that has drawn crowds here since the city's earliest days.

• Cross Street Market (Federal Hill)

  Since 1846, Cross Street Market has been the commercial heart of the Federal Hill community, and you have reached one of Baltimore's historic neighborhood markets.

• American Visionary Art Museum (Federal Hill / Inner Harbor)

  Mirror shards and painted glass cover the building in front of you, glittering like nothing else in the city.

• Baltimore Museum of Industry (Inner Harbor / South Baltimore)

  Ask yourself who usually gets a museum built in their honor, and who gets left out of the story entirely.

• Broadway Market (Fells Point)

  Your arrival puts you in one of Baltimore's oldest continuously operating public markets, serving Fells Point since 1784.

• Robert Long House (Fells Point)

  Your walk leads to Baltimore's oldest surviving urban residence, a Federal-period house in Fells Point since 1765, a decade ahead of the American Revolution.

• Horse You Came In On Saloon (Fells Point)

  Low ceilings and worn wood floors greet you at an address on Thames Street that has poured drinks since 1775.

• Patterson Park Pagoda (Patterson Park / East Baltimore)

  Your climb brings you to one of Baltimore's most beloved landmarks, a wooden observation tower raised in 1891 in the style of a Chinese pagoda…

• O'Donnell Square (Canton)

  O'Donnell Square puts you at the center of Canton, one of Baltimore's most vibrant waterfront neighborhoods, on ground named for John O'Donnell, the Irish-born sea…

• Little Italy (Little Italy / Harbor East)

  Little Italy, Baltimore's Italian American neighborhood, wraps you in a compact enclave of rowhouses, restaurants, and Catholic churches that has maintained its cultural identity for…

• Old Otterbein Church (Inner Harbor / Downtown)

  A simple brick structure of red walls and white trim faces you, unchanged since it was raised in 1785, making it the oldest church building…

• Enoch Pratt Free Library (Downtown)

  Here on Cathedral Street sits the central branch of one of the most important public library systems in American history, built on a principle that…

• Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum (Downtown / Pigtown)

  Two blocks from Camden Yards, you have reached the rowhouse where the most famous baseball player in history was born on February 6, 1895.

• Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower (Downtown)

  Look up, and a clock face fifteen feet wide stares back, its minute hand alone weighing five hundred pounds.

• Greenmount Cemetery (East Baltimore / Greenmount)

  Greenmount Cemetery opens in front of you, one of the most historically significant burial grounds in America and the final resting place of Baltimore's most…

• Homewood House Museum (Charles Village / Johns Hopkins Campus)

  Homewood House, the mansion in front of you, is one of the finest examples of Federal-style domestic architecture in the United States, a house that…

• Baltimore Museum of Art (Charles Village)

  Behind these neoclassical walls sits the leading art museum in Maryland, holding the single largest collection of work by Henri Matisse anywhere in the world.

• Penn Station (Station North)

  Penn Station fills your view, one of the finest remaining Beaux-Arts railroad stations in the United States and Baltimore's gateway to the Eastern Seaboard for…

• Hampden / 34th Street Christmas Lights (Hampden)

  Ask yourself why a working-class mill community, once wary of outsiders, ended up producing Baltimore's most joyfully over-the-top holiday spectacle.

• Druid Hill Park (Druid Hill)

  Druid Hill Park, 745 acres that Baltimore acquired in 1860, spreads out from where you walk, one of the oldest and largest urban parks in…

• Natty Boh Tower / National Bohemian Beer Sign (Brewers Hill / East Baltimore)

  One eye winks down at you from a giant neon face, an American beer mascot who has watched over this Brewers Hill skyline since 1936.

• Roland Park Bungalows / Early Planned Suburb (Roland Park / North Baltimore)

  Roland Park, the neighborhood you have entered, is what many urban historians consider the first planned residential suburb in the United States, a development that…

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