Follow The Yellow Brick Road

While many laud Baltimore's Inner Harbor as a planning success, the tourist site fails in one regard: most visitors never venture into the rest of the city. In an effort to draw the Inner Harbor's critical mass further into downtown, the mayor's office and Baltimore businesses are teaming up to create a "City Heritage Walk" throughout the city, "connecting the dots" between historical landmarks. The inspiration? Boston’s 2.5-mile Freedom Trail, "which began as a red line painted on city sidewalks, [and] is utilized by upward of 3 million people a year." The overarching theme and all of the sites have not been finalized, but the Baltimore path may focus on the first half of the 19th century, when the city was the second largest in the nation. "It's about connecting our cultural attractions so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts," said one proponent.