Walk to the foot of the Inner Harbor on any summer evening and you can see the version of Baltimore the city's planners imagined in the 1950s. The U.S.S. Constellation, a Civil War-era sloop and the only surviving ship from that era still afloat, rests at the head of the harbor. The National Aquarium's pyramid-roofed wedge cuts the skyline north of Pier 3. A water taxi crosses the harbor to Fells Point. Tourists eat crab cakes outside Harborplace. The dome of Federal Hill, the small park where Major Samuel Smith planted artillery to defend the city during the 1814 British attack, rises south of the water. None of this existed in any recognizable form before the 1970s. The Inner Harbor before redevelopment was rotting piers, abandoned warehouses, and the wreckage of a port that had moved its commerce elsewhere. The American Institute of Architects in 1984 called the transformation one of the supreme achievements of large-scale urban design in U.S. history.
The Inner Harbor, at the mouth of the Jones Falls stream on the Patapsco River, was always too shallow for heavy industrial use. Baltimore's deep-water shipping had concentrated since the eighteenth century at Locust Point, Fells Point, and Canton - the deeper basins farther east. The Inner Harbor handled coastal steamers and the freight lines that connected the city to Norfolk, Charleston, and the Chesapeake's smaller ports. After World War II, container shipping killed the freight business. Old Bay Line steamers stopped running to Norfolk in 1962. The piers and warehouses along the Inner Harbor went idle, then crumbled. By the late 1950s the head of the harbor was a wasteland of rotting timber, broken glass, and discarded crates. The American Institute of Steel Construction had described the Inner Harbor in 1955 as a slum of warehouses better demolished than restored.
The redevelopment began in March 1958 when Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. and the City Council adopted the 33-acre Charles Center project just north of the Inner Harbor. The new project tore down decaying mid-block buildings and built office towers, hotels, and modern retail. Charles Center was finished by 1965. At the start of his second term in 1963, Mayor Theodore McKeldin expanded the redevelopment program to encompass 240 acres around the Inner Harbor itself. The grass-covered parkland that emerged in the early 1970s was not yet the tourist district it would become; it was, deliberately, empty civic space awaiting the next phase. Federal Hill Park on the south side, the brick promenade around the water, and the first office buildings on the north shore were all in place by the mid-1970s.
On July 4, 1976, after the U.S. Bicentennial tall ships rendezvous in New York, eight foreign-flag tall ships sailed south and called at Baltimore. The crowds they drew - hundreds of thousands of people lining the Inner Harbor walls - convinced planners that the public was hungry for waterfront experiences. The redevelopment accelerated. The National Aquarium opened on Pier 3 in August 1981. The Maryland Science Center had opened in 1976. Harborplace, the two-pavilion festival marketplace developed by James Rouse's company on the northwest corner of the harbor, opened on July 2, 1980. The Baltimore Convention Center followed. The Hyatt Regency. The World Trade Center, designed by I.M. Pei. By the end of the 1980s, the Inner Harbor was generating tourist traffic numbers that rivaled colonial Williamsburg. The model was copied in Boston's Quincy Market, Manhattan's South Street Seaport, Sydney's Darling Harbour, Liverpool's Albert Dock, and dozens of other waterfronts around the world.
The Historic Ships of Baltimore collection now anchors much of the Inner Harbor's character. The U.S.S. Constellation, the last surviving Civil War-era American naval vessel still afloat, rests at Pier 1 - a sloop-of-war launched in 1854 that hunted slave ships off the African coast and chased Confederate raiders during the Civil War. The U.S.S. Torsk, a Tench-class submarine commissioned in December 1944, was the last U.S. warship to sink an enemy combatant ship in World War II, two Japanese coastal defense frigates sunk off northern Honshu on August 14, 1945. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter WHEC-37, the Taney, is the last surviving combatant vessel from the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor still afloat. The Lightship Chesapeake and the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse complete the floating museum. Together they form one of the country's better naval museum collections, all docked along a single curve of restored waterfront.
The redevelopment kept extending east along the waterfront toward Fells Point and Little Italy through the 1990s and 2000s. Harbor East, the area east of the original Inner Harbor district, filled in with condominium towers, hotels, restaurants, and the Whole Foods that became a kind of unofficial landmark of the neighborhood. The Ritz-Carlton Residences anchor the southeast corner of the Inner Harbor proper. Hurricane Isabel flooded the harbor district in September 2003; the Baltimore World Trade Center stayed closed for a month, but the flood-control features built into the redevelopment master plan saved most of the other buildings. In March 2004, a water taxi capsized in a sudden storm on the Patapsco near Fort McHenry, killing five passengers. The accident was a stark reminder that the harbor is, beneath the tourist veneer, still working water. Plans for the next round of Inner Harbor development have been discussed for years without consensus. What anchors the place is the original 1960s decision to remove the rotting industrial uses and let the city's residents back onto their own waterfront. The decision worked. It is still working.
The Inner Harbor is located at approximately 39.2851 N, 76.6105 W in downtown Baltimore, at the mouth of the Jones Falls stream on the northwest branch of the Patapsco River. The site sits well outside the Washington Flight Restricted Zone and Special Flight Rules Area. BWI Marshall (KBWI) is 9 miles southwest. Martin State Airport (KMTN) is 6 miles east. From altitude, the Inner Harbor is identifiable as a rounded body of water flanked by the distinctive pyramid roof of the National Aquarium on the north shore and the brick Federal Hill rising on the south.