A couple of friends and I decided to take the Cardinal from Cincinnati to Baltimore to go visit the B&O museum, and it turned into an exploration of nearly every mode of transportation currently available in eastern cities. I'll try not to narrate too much as we venture around Baltimore for a week over the course of these posts. This was my first "extended" trip to an east coast city, and having gone into the trip knowing next to nothing about Baltimore, I came away surprised at how well preserved its urban way of life was. I'll be breaking this trip up into 3 parts so that I don't tax everyone with too many photos at once.

 

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Goodbye for now, Cincinnati!

 

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Passing under the New River Gorge bridge on the Cardinal (mode #1).

 

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We made it to Penn Station on time, but 16 hours is an incredibly long time to be cooped up in a rail coach. America definitely needs better rail options.

 

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The B&O museum was fittingly in an old B&O roundhouse. Makes sense.

 

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Love the streamlining on this one.

 

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The Bromo-Seltzer building and #10 Light Street.

 

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A bit chilly for a baseball game today.

 

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The interior of the above building.

 

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I took the bus (mode #2) out to Fell's Point, where I would be staying with another friend for the rest of the week.

 

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Anyone who claims that OTR is getting too oversaturated with bars and restaurants needs to visit a fully-intact urban neighborhood like Fells. I think it's really difficult for Cincinnatians to imagine that a neighborhood can thrive in this manner.

 

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Little Italy. Baltimore's neighborhoods, especially the current and former working-class ones, seem to bleed into each other architecturally. They derive a lot of character from the people who live there instead of dramatically different housing styles, since the rowhouse is ubiquitous in this city.

 

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Morning traffic. It was great how easily you can get around on foot here. It was only around a 20 minute walk to get downtown from where I was staying. This was helpful, because the circulator buses do a good job at getting you into the outer neighborhoods but aren't as good as getting you back downtown or at connecting to other routes.

 

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A church in Federal Hill.

 

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I can't be the only one who doesn't care for formstone all that much.

 

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These rowhouses were a bit curvier than some of the ones on the east side. I wonder if this was a bit more affluent of an area?

 

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The Harbor East area was in the middle of a huge building boom.

 

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A better view of the Domino Sugar plant.

 

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Baltimore doesn't have a very impressive downtown skyline. It derives its charm from the street level and the harbor.

 

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I was completely caught off-guard by how hilly Baltimore. I went into this trip knowing virtually nothing about the city and no expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised at everything I discovered.

 

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Back at the Inner Harbor.

 

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Some of the huge infill in Harbor East.

 

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I wish Cincinnati was getting more quality infill like this down in the Banks.

 

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A nice sunset.

 

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A bit blurry but still a cool shot of the National Bohemian sign. One of my favorite things about Baltimore was the huge factories with big neon signs always looming on the horizon. It's a very unique and different city.

 

I think that's good for this first run. I'll be putting up Parts 2 and 3 in the coming days. The best is yet to come!

 

Fantastic set of pictures! I'm excited to see parts 2 and 3. Baltimore has long been one of my favorite cities. It is definitely an East Coast city, but there's an industrial grittiness there that reminds me a bit of places like Cleveland. And also, the first time I was ever in Cincinnati, my first thought was that it reminded me a lot of Baltimore. It's a shame that most people's opinion of Baltimore is typically based on only one or two things: 1) The Wire/2015 riots 2) The Inner Harbor. There is no doubt that Baltimore faces a huge problem with poverty, segregation, and violence, but there are many positives to the city as well. And the Inner Harbor is a pleasant place to walk around and most people I know enjoy going there, but it lacks authenticity and you don't get a good feel for the city there. Any place that has a Ripley's Believe It Or Not next to a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company loses points in my book.

 

I also like Baltimore's Charm City Circulator. The buses are clean, its easy to use, and the system is very extensive (and best of all, it's free). The Light Rail and Metro Subway have their uses, but as a visitor to the city, I did not often find them to be useful to getting to various points of interest around the city. Having used the MTA frequently, I know firsthand what a blow the Red Line cancellation was the city.

 

The Ravens still suck though.

^ I pretty much agree with your sentiments. Baltimore's blue-collar culture felt a lot like Cleveland, but the built form is a lot more like Cincinnati. It exists in a weird sweet-spot as an early eastern city that developed most of its culture during the Industrial Revolution. The Inner Harbor is pleasant enough, but I much preferred just wandering around the outer neighborhoods. It was actually really nice going into this trip knowing virtually nothing about the city, since it let me really experience it without any preconceptions. Mount Vernon (which will show up in a later post) completely blew me away, and I didn't even know that it existed before I got to Baltimore. I don't know why, but I was really surprised at how different a built environment feels when it's just being "lived in". Most of the Rust Belt cities that I know more intimately have a stronger contrast between the blighted neighborhoods that have been deserted for decades and the newly-rehabbed trendy 'hoods. There was a bit of a culture shock going to a place like Upper Fell's Point that has more-or-less been continually occupied for probably a century and a half, where nothing is really abandoned but everything is clearly "well used" and a bit rough around the edges (which isn't a bad thing). There aren't too terribly many places like that out this way, and certainly not on the same scale. Such a very different "vibe" that's hard to describe but you know it when you experience it. Obviously Baltimore has large stretches of blighted areas just like any city grappling with post-industrialization, but the fact that they've held onto such great urban neighborhoods for so long is really a treat to experience.

 

 

One of the big problems with Baltimore right now is that they have the same demolition mindset as the Rust Belt. The city is actually much stronger demographically and economically, so it's ridiculous to see them tear down so much historic housing. Baltimore is one of America's strongest cities in terms of urban housing stock, but it's not being preserved well enough.

 

Baltimore is one of the nation's oldest cities and it has outstanding brick row housing in historically mixed use neighborhoods with just the right density. A lot of this housing is in slums and is being torn down right now. It's really sad to see the city lacks the backbone to protest and stop these demolitions. Baltimore is about to boom since it's the cheapest city on the East Coast and can get spillover from all the more expensive places on the Atlantic.

 

*Baltimore looks somewhat like a blend of Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo (Ohio's big, old, industrial, shipping/transportation hubs), but it wins handily on urban housing. Baltimore is one of the nation's top cities for row housing due to how damn old it is. There are whole neighborhoods of three-story Brooklyn-style row homes that would still be mixed use if they were wealthier. Sadly, many demolitions are happening in these neighborhoods. Crime is a really serious issue that is keeping people out of the bad neighborhoods.

 

And Baltimore is not like legendary West Coast crime magnet Oakland where it can be saved by spillover from a nearby wealthier city. DC still has plenty of ghettos left to gentrify, and it's much further away from Baltimore than San Francisco is from Oakland. Economically, DC-Baltimore is the only urban region close to the wealth of the Bay, but it has a lot more run-down neighborhoods experiencing first wave gentrification. Everything in San Francisco and Oakland is second wave or third wave hyper-gentrification. This difference is due to population decline in DC and Baltimore. Both cities have a long way to go before full population recovery. San Francisco is bigger than it has ever been. So is Oakland.

 

**Ohio really needs to keep an eye on Baltimore since it's the most Rust Belt of East Coast cities, but is further along in its transformation to a modern economy. There are many lessons to learn from it even as it shows weakness with historic preservation. Toledo always tried to copy the Inner Harbor and failed because Toledo didn't have any anchor tourist attractions on the water. And well, Toledo is much poorer and more economically destroyed than Baltimore. The same can be said about a lot of other Rust Belt cities.

Great photos!

Another neighborhood like fells point would be Bridgeport in Chicago. It's the oldest hood in the city as it was an independent city and never gentrified yet never collapsed thanks to the Daley's, in spite of an influx of Chinese from nearby Chinatown and some hipsters fleeing the increasingly expensive nw side.

 

You are right about a neighborhood of that vintage and style being a rare and odd experience in today's urban America.

 

The only other place I can think of that was like that was the west side of Cincinnati pre 2000 - it's since declined quite a bit though...

Good pics. Reminds me of my first trip to Baltimore in 1985 right after the Inner Harbor opened. Much of downtown was torn up for the new subway and light-rail lines, and major renovations were just getting started for Little Italy. We took the train from Cleveland via a stopover in New York City and videotaped the entire trip, including driving around downtown Baltimore. I converted that Beta tape to DVD a few years ago and got a reminder of how much rougher and grittier Baltimore  (indeed, most cities) were back then.