BGE-2155N – Light Street looking south from Pratt Street, 1929.

For most Baltimoreans in the early twentieth century, a journey down the Chesapeake Bay began at the Light Street wharves. Along this teeming quarter-mile stretch of waterfront property, dozens of wooden warehouses, commercial buildings, and docks housed equal numbers of lumber, packet, and produce companies eager to ship and receive goods deemed too insignificant for the larger port facilities at Canton and Locust Point. Among the best known businesses on the wharves was the Baltimore Steam Packet Company—for more than 120 years, the “Old Bay Line’” regularly ferried passengers to Norfolk, Virginia in genteel accommodations.

(Take photo from the median strip on Light St. behind the fountain at McKeldin Square, looking south.)