I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.
– John Waters, Shock Value

BALTIMORE is among the more enjoyable stops on the east coast, and its closely knit neighborhoods and historic quarters provide an engaging backdrop to many diverse attractions, especially those along its celebrated waterfront, like the Inner Harbor’s National Aquarium and the Pier 6 Concert Pavilion and Power Plant entertainment complex. The city also boasts top-rated museums, like the Walters Art Museum and the child-oriented, interactive Port Discovery, which cover everything from fine arts through black history to urban archeology.

That Baltimore has been home to such diverse figures as writers Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Tyler and civil rights activists Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall goes some way towards explaining its sometimes bizarrely varied character, but it’s still hard to pin down exactly what makes it such an engaging city to visit, and to live in.