Charmed City

With new design hotels and a high-low culinary renaissance, Baltimore is getting its groove back.

- By Simon Willis

THE LATROBE BUILDING in central Baltimore has long been a symbol of the city’s shifting fortunes. It opened in 1912 as luxuriously appointed apartments for young men who'd found prosperity in what was then a flourishing port. But as the city went from boom to bust, so did the Latrobe. Over the years it has been a flophouse, a makeshift office block, and finally, when its owners went bankrupt, an abandoned shell.

But the building has rediscovered its old glamour: it’s now the fabulously over-the-top hotel Ulysses (doubles from $150), which opened in September 2022. When I checked in one recent afternoon, I was shown to a room that mixed the louche style of the 1970s with the richness of the Renaissance. The carpet was blue leopard print, and the claw-foot tub was encircled by silk curtains. Downstairs, the lobby was hung with brooding, Caravaggio-esque paintings, and orchids grew from silver planters with swan’s necks for handles.

This is a long way from the Baltimore depicted in The Wire, the TV cop drama that began in 2002 and made the city infamous for its struggles with crime and corruption. When the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore (doubles from $419), a sleek waterfront hotel, opened in 2017, it seemed to coincide with the beginning of a new chapter. The story was interrupted by the pandemic, but, as a new wave of hotels and restaurants illustrates, the momentum is back.

In Hampden, a neighborhood of row houses in the north of the city, I spent a night at the Guesthouse by Good Neighbor (