Inner Harbor East, Baltimore

Harbor East Inner Harbor East
Neighborhood
Harbor East viewed from the Inner Harbor to the west.
Country	United States
State	Maryland
City	Baltimore
District	Southeastern

Inner Harbor East, now more recently referred to more commonly as simply as Harbor East, is a relatively new mixed-use development project in Baltimore, Maryland, United States along the northern shoreline of the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River, which is the Baltimore Harbor, and its Inner Harbor (formerly known as "The Basin"). Major tenants of Harbor East include the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel on Aliceanna Street, between the Waterfront Promenade on the west and to the east is the President Street Boulevard and the Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial (monument) in the International Drive circle at the south end. (formerly originally planned as the Wyndham Hotel in the 1990s). Also, the new Legg Mason Tower, in which the famous financial services firm moved from the central downtown is located across the street. A Four Seasons Hotel opened in November 2011.

Baltimore’s eastern Inner Harbor waterfront at the mouth of the Jones Falls stream was filled with decaying warehouses from the industrial boom and construction following the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 which devastated downtown to the west. Center of this waterfront industrial district was the landmark but sorely neglected, former passenger station, switching buildings, roundhouses, tracks and rail yards of the historic 1849-50 President Street Station of the former Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (which merged into the later, larger multi-state Pennsylvania Railroad in 1881). Located at the southeastern corner of narrow President Street and Canton Avenue (later renamed Fleet Street), The PSS's foundations were laid in May 1849, and was completed and occupied for business on February 18, 1850. The curved-roof, painted brick "head-house" was of Greek Revival-style and had a long wood and iron-beamed shed to the rear in the east, sheltering arriving and departing trains, with cars and locomotives. A famous early photograph, taken in the summer of 1849, from the summit of Federal Hill across the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River, shows the dense group of houses, buildings and lumber piles along the waterfront, with the under-construction Station with the trusses of its roof showing. Beyond on the horizon, is the grassy meadow hills of future Washington Hill, Broadway and the site of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It supplanted an earlier, simpler depot dating back to the late 1830s and the predecessor line, Baltimore and Port Deposit Railroad (1832-1838), that merged into the new P.W. & B. Railroad with three other connecting lines, providing a continuous route to the northeast, completed to the river by 1837, and through to the "City of Brotherly Love" by 1838, for a ticket price of $4.00 and a journey time of six hours, except for the steam ferry-boat crossing of the Susquehanna River by the railroad's ferry "Susquehanna", (the first in America of its type), later replaced in 1854 by the larger more commodius "Maryland", which with the "Harriet Lane" served until the bridge. This compared with a several days trip before by coach or horse-back. A tremendous, wood-beamed, iron-trussed bridge, on twelve stone and concrete piers; a major American industrial accomplishment, (ranking with the crossings of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers) was a project to span that wide tributary to the Chesapeake Bay, was not completed until November 26, 1866, from Havre de Grace to Perryville, after a delay caused by a vicious windstorm/tornado, blew portions of the un-completed span into the river, the previous July.