Though I spent most of my days in Baltimore tending to Civil Air Patrol business, I did have some free time to walk about the inner harbor area and had dinner at a couple of nearby restaurants. At one point, our North Dakota contingent attempted to have dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe which is housed in the historic Pratt Street Power Plant building along with Barnes and Noble and other retailers. I say “attempted” because even though the restaurant didn’t appear busy, we were put on a wait for seating. After awhile, we decided to move on and had dinner elsewhere.

But this post and photo isn’t about the restaurant or even the book store. It’s about the historic Pratt Street Station that served to generate power for various purposes until 1973. Built at the turn of the 20th century and completed in 1909, the power plant supplied electricity to run the rail systems that operated around the city at the time. During construction, the brick and steel structure was one of the few buildings to survive a major fire that ravaged the downtown area in 1904.

The plant, located on Pier 4 of the Inner Harbor was coal fired and the company accepted coal deliveries by harbor bound freighters. A complete history of the building including its time as an indoor theme park is well described in an article on Wikipedia here.

About the photo: The building is massive and my Samsung S6 cellphone couldn’t fit the entire building in frame from where I stood. No matter, I captured two images, one of the smoke stacks and upper floors and another of the main floor and street along Pier 4. Using Lightroom’s Panorama function, I joined the two images to create a larger resolution image. After basic edits in Lightroom, I used Luminar Flex to complete the photo processing. In most browsers, you can select the image to get a better view of the photo.

John Steiner