Charles Center is a large-scale urban redevelopment project in central Baltimore's downtown business district of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

D'Alesandro, Jr. (1947−1959) and Theodore R. McKeldin, (1943−1947 and 1963−1967) and many in their administrations, which formed the basis of a $25 million bond issue voted on by the citizens of Baltimore City during the municipal elections in November 1958.

The 33 acres (13 ha) site includes three public plazas, (Charles, Center, and Hopkins) designed by RTKL, connected by walkways, staircases and pedestrian bridges.

By 2013, "Harbor East" boasted an extension southeastward from the southern end of the Jones Falls Expressway − (Interstate 83) of old alley-like President Street south to become a wide, tree-lined boulevard ending in a central circle with a sculpture and monument with a stepped water fall at the base commemorating the Katryn Forest Massacre of 1939−40 by Soviet Red Army of captured Polish Army officers at the beginning of World War II, a memorial project of the Polish-American community in East Baltimore.

Surrounding the impressive but sober sculpture is an array of shiny new glass and steel modernist hotels, office buildings with ground-level stores, shops, markets and a movie theatre, even with a restored "President Street Station" from 1849 to 1850 of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad with exhibits and activities for a "Baltimore Civil War Museum" commemorating the Station's railroad history as the oldest big-city train station left, an architectural landmark for its unique "Howe truss" type roof structure, and commemorating the "First Bloodshed of the Civil War" on Friday, April 19, 1861, with the occurrence of the famed "Pratt Street Riot" which took place all along President Street north to turn west on Pratt Street to the Camden Street Station (restored today with museums and exhibits inside for sports, entertainment and its Civil War, labor and railroad history) of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad near the present Camden Yards stadiums with near-by "Oriole Park" for the baseball team Baltimore Orioles.