City Center is the historic financial district in Baltimore that has increasingly shifted eastward and into the Inner Harbor.

The Inner Harbor features a large number of restaurants, hotels, retail areas (such as Harborplace), and entertainment (such as Power Plant Live!).

[3] Like much of Baltimore, the area features historic, often industrial, buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have been repurposed for modern industry and residences, including the Pratt Street Power Plant which was built in 1900 and now hosts a Barnes & Noble bookstore, the Baltimore Hard Rock Cafe, and other retail tenants.

It is also home to the site of the "Superblock" project that will include hundreds of condos and apartments as well as a variety of retail and commercial space.

To the very north is Penn Station, which offers Amtrak service to several U.S. major cities as well as MARC service to Washington, D.C. A major north–south avenue in Mount Vernon is Cathedral Street, named for the National Shrine of the Assumption, the first Catholic cathedral built in the United States, which is also considered the masterpiece of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the "father of American architecture" and famed creator of the U.S. Capitol.