Oriole Park at Camden Yards: The Ballpark and Downtown Baltimore

Camden Station, at 301 West Camden Street and adjacent to the ballpark, is served by both the Baltimore Light RailLink and MARC's Camden Line commuter rail to Washington, D.C.

The Camden Line's stations are Camden Station, St. Denis, Dorsey, Jessup, Savage, Laurel Race Track, Laurel, Muirkirk, Greenbelt, College Park, Riverdale and Union Station in Washington, with Halethorpe, West Baltimore and BWI Airport also served on the broader MARC network. A first draft of this list carried Bowie State, Rockville and Silver Spring, which are not on this line, and Odenton, which could not be confirmed; none of the four appears here.

The Light RailLink runs from Hunt Valley to Glen Burnie with a spur to BWI Airport, and connects to Penn Station and to MARC service at Camden Yards. Its downtown stations near the ballpark include Camden Station, Convention Center, Baltimore Arena, and Stadium/Federal Hill, formerly Hamburg Street.

MTA Maryland bus routes 69, 70, 73 and 75 serve the area around the ballpark. The Charm City Circulator is free; its Orange Route runs along Pratt and Lombard Streets and Baltimore Street between Harbor East and Hollins Market, and lists Camden Yards among the destinations it serves. For intercity buses, a city bus depot at 2110 Haines Street offers Greyhound and Peter Pan service to Washington, New York and Philadelphia, and BoltBus departs Baltimore's Penn Station, itself reachable by light rail, for Washington, Philadelphia and Boston.

On parking, the record is thin and is published as thin. The Maryland Stadium Authority's own parking page notes that availability can change on game days; it names no lots and publishes no rates, and neither does this guide. A first draft named an operator and a phone number from that page; the verification struck both. Bicycle parking is documented in more detail than car parking: 73 spaces at Oriole Park's Gate H, 80 at Gate C, 3 at the Warehouse, and 36 at MARC's Camden Station.

Ridgely's Delight is 24 acres bounded by Russell and Greene Streets to the east, West Pratt Street to the north, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the west and south. The land was surveyed in 1732 for Charles Ridgely, and the name comes from Charles Ridgely II's plantation, Ridgely's Whim. Its rowhouses were built from 1823 onward in Italianate, Federal and Late Federal styles, and the district went on the National Register on June 6, 1980. Babe Ruth was born inside it, in the row house at 216 Emory Street, on February 6, 1895; that house opened as a museum in July 1974 after the press secretary Hirsh Goldberg argued against its planned demolition, became the official museum of the Orioles in 1983, and received the ball from Camden Yards' first home run when the ballpark opened in 1992.

Horseshoe Baltimore is at 1525 Russell Street, adjacent to M&T Bank Stadium and Oriole Park: a casino with a 122,000-square-foot gaming floor and a World Series of Poker room, opened on August 26, 2014 and owned and operated by CBAC Gaming, a consortium led by Caesars Entertainment. Pickles Pub is at 520 Washington Blvd, a sports bar that its own site describes as drawing Orioles and Ravens gameday crowds.

Eutaw Street carries two markets and a theatre. Lexington Market, at 112 N Eutaw, was established in 1782 on land donated by the Continental Army commander General John Eager Howard and is one of the longest-running public markets in the nation; its 1871 shed burned in 1949, and a 60,000-square-foot replacement housing 50 merchants was completed in 2022. Faidley's Seafood has been inside it since 1886, when John W. Faidley Sr. founded it in two wooden sheds there; as of 2024 it is owned and operated by Nancy Devine and her husband Bill, descendants of the founder. The Hippodrome Theatre, at 12 N. Eutaw, opened in 1914 as a 2,300-seat vaudeville and movie palace designed by Thomas W. Lamb in the Beaux Arts style, and at its debut was the largest theatre in the United States south of Philadelphia; it closed as a movie theater in 1990, went on the National Register on January 14, 2000, and reopened after a 2004 renovation as part of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center. Pratt Street Ale House is at 206 W Pratt St, and its own site gives its name and address and nothing more.

Federal Hill has the last two entries. The park there covers 10.3 acres bounded by Francis Scott Key Highway, Battery Avenue, Warren Avenue and Covington Street, maintained by the city's Department of Recreation and Parks. It was John Smith's Hill, after Captain John Smith's 1608 voyage, until Maryland's Constitutional ratification celebration of 1788 renamed it; it served military purposes in the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and the city acquired it as public property in 1880. Cross Street Market, at 1065 S Charles Street, spans Cross Street between Light and Charles in the same neighborhood; it was the scene of the Cross Street Market Hall riot of September 8, 1876, and was redeveloped for $8.4 million by spring 2019.

One thing to know about the record behind all of this. Six of these eleven places carry no statement here about whether they are trading now: the Babe Ruth museum, Pickles Pub, the Hippodrome, Pratt Street Ale House and Cross Street Market all rest on an operator's own site once a failed licence source was removed, and Ridgely's Delight is a neighborhood rather than a business. None of that is evidence of closure, and none should be inferred. Telephone first.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992, on the site of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Camden Station rail yard. HOK Sport, now Populous, designed it in a retro-classic style, and it pioneered that design, which intentionally contrasted with the symmetrical multipurpose stadiums built in the preceding era. Capacity is 42,455 as of 2026.

The B&O Warehouse behind the right-field wall is the older building. The railroad began it in 1899, with later sections completed in 1905, as a freight facility able to hold 1,000 carloads at a time; it is eight stories and 1,116 feet long. By the 1970s it stood largely vacant. The 1992 design incorporated it rather than demolishing it, and it now houses Orioles team offices, team spaces and a private club.

Camden Station itself, at 301 W. Camden Street, is a three-story Italianate brick structure substantially completed by 1857, and it served B&O passenger trains into the 1980s. President Lincoln passed through it in February 1861 on the way to his inauguration, and changed trains there in 1863 before delivering the Gettysburg Address; news of the Battle of Fort Sumter first reached Baltimore at the station's telegraph office on April 12, 1861. The Sports Legends Museum, which had operated in the station building, closed in 2015.

The names come from the same source. Camden Street was named after Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, and Maryland governor William Donald Schaefer championed the Camden Yards name for the redeveloped 85-acre complex during the site's redevelopment in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One point of jurisdiction, because this guide's county field depends on it: Baltimore was designated an independent city by the Constitution of Maryland in 1851. It is not under the jurisdiction of any county, and is almost entirely surrounded by Baltimore County while being politically independent of it.