Baltimore: An Office profile;

              Baltimore is a city of contradictions. Lo­cated
south of the Mason-Dixon line, it
lies in a state that never seceded from the
Union. Essentially southern in tempera­ment,
pace and quality of life, it is one of
the great industrial port cities of the
nation. Despite a population of less than
one million in Baltimore proper, it is
served by three daily newspapers, the
same number published in New York
City. Like most metropolitan areas today,
Baltimore is plagued by financial prob­lems.
Yet it ended fiscal 1975 with a sur­plus
of $52 million.
Perhaps most important, it is a city
that has not lost its will to live, that has
taken a hard look at its economic and
social ills and is taking realistic steps to
find remedies. It is a city where pictur­esque
historic neighborhoods contrast
with new construction—a Baltimore outer
harbor bridge to be opened later this
year that will improve the traffic flow
on 1-95, the major interstate highway
running from Maine to Florida; an ex­tensive
redevelopment of the Inner Har­bor
area that will turn it into an
attractive and versatile business, cultural
and recreational center.
Baltimore is a city where the residents
voted approval of a $10 million bond
issue to finance a complete renovation of
the historic, century-old City Hall, while
in Annapolis the State General Assembly
recently voted approval for a new under­ground
rapid transit system and a con­vention
center for Baltimore. It is a
municipality that takes pride in being
home to both the Peabody Institute, the
oldest privately endowed music school
in the country, and the ultramodern
Maryland Science Center, built by the
179-year-old Maryland Academy of Sci­ences
and opened just this June as part of
the Inner Harbor Redevelopment Area.
Like the original colony of Maryland,
established early in the seventeenth cen­tury,
Baltimore was founded on the
tobacco trade. Named after the English
Barons Baltimore, the city was chartered
as a "tobacco port" in 1729. It was not
long before Baltimore's harbor facilities
and strong merchant community trans­formed
it into one of the busiest port
cities in the New World. By the time of
the American Revolution, Baltimore had
established itself as a key center of ship­ping
to northern Europe, the Mediter­ranean
and the Caribbean. (It's a little-known
fact that Congress held sessions
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An Office Profile