Located 1.5 miles east of Baltimore's downtown central business district, Fells Point is known for its maritime history and character.

It is one of several areas in and around Baltimore listed on the National Register of Historic Places, (maintained by the National Park Service), the first designated from Maryland, and is one of the first registered historic districts in the United States to combine two separate waterfront communities (along with Federal Hill to the southwest across the Patapsco River and the Harbor on the "Old South Baltimore" peninsula of "Whetstone Point" at Fort McHenry).

[2][3] First described by a European seafarer as "Long Island Point" in 1670, the area later to be known as Fells Point was a thin little peninsula jutting out southwestward between the streams of Jones Falls and Harford Run (later covered over by Central Avenue) to the west and Harris Creek to the east (now culverted beneath the community of Canton) and further east to Colgate Creek (now surrounded by the Dundalk and Sea Girt Marine Terminals).

[4] Fell's Point shipyards became best known for producing topsail schooners, sometimes called "Baltimore clippers", renowned for their great speed and handling.

[6] Consequently, Baltimore became a principal target of the British during the war, which eventually led to the attack on the city and the bombardment of Fort McHenry in September 1814.

It has been an immigrant neighborhood since the 19th century, in part because it was a major point of entry into the United States,[7] but mainly because jobs were available in Baltimore's industries and on the waterfront.

In the era before mass transportation, immigrants crowded into the cheap housing near the shipbuilding yards, warehouses and factories of Fells Point.

In 1835, the later famous abolitionist, writer/author, public speaker/orator, agitator and minister/ambassador Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), while still enslaved, was hired out to the shipbuilder John A. Robb as a caulker at the Fells Point shipyard.

[8][9] In his autobiography, Douglass recounts that, years earlier, the first time he had been sent to Baltimore, the Fells Point neighborhood was where he taught himself to read and write, copying the letters with which the men in the shipyard labeled boards and "making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street.

"[10] Fells Point remained a shipbuilding center until the Civil War, when it could no longer handle the larger ships (also now built with steam power and paddle wheels/screw propellers) then coming into use.

Likewise, the shipping industry slowly moved away to larger facilities, some of the newer shipyards further downriver with deeper waters close to shore on the outer Patapsco River, and the Fells Point area became a manufacturing center, with innovations in canning, along with nearby Canton to the east, which was an early commercial/industrial and residential development by the Canton Company of the O'Donnell family and Pattersons in the early 1800s.

Eventually, much of the manufacturing left the city by the 1980s, resulting in urban decay until preservationists in the 1960s, 1970s and late 20th century organized to save the area's historic buildings and neighborhood waterfront fabric along with Federal Hill on the other western side of the newly renamed with proposed redevelopment of the Inner Harbor (formerly called "The Basin") from a proposed East-West Highway of Interstate 95 which was to run north to south down the East Coast states, begun in the mid-1960s.

This project would have entailed extensive demolition within Fells Point, and across the river in Federal Hill/South Baltimore and the highway would have cut off the remainder of the neighborhood from the waterfront.

Fells Point achieved some fame as the central setting for the 1990s NBC TV network police drama Homicide: Life on the Street, (based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon of The Baltimore Sun, the city's longtime daily newspaper) and has been the site of many films shot in Baltimore.

Fells Point, located to the east of the Inner Harbor, suffered extensive flooding during Hurricane Isabel in September 2003,[15] with water as high as 10 feet.