Common Tourist Scams in Baltimore (and How to Avoid Them)
The areas with the highest violent-crime baselines
- Sandtown-Winchester / Harlem Park / Penn-North (Western District) — the post-Freddie-Gray epicentre. Top-10 violent-crime neighbourhood rates in the US per capita. Tourists do not enter.
- Park Heights (Northwestern) — high-violent-crime baseline; Pimlico Race Course (Preakness Stakes) is in a heavily-policed pocket but the surrounding blocks are not.
- Cherry Hill (south of the harbour) — isolated peninsula; high-violent-crime; no tourist destination.
- Broadway East + Oliver (East Baltimore) — high-violent-crime; immediately north of the Johns Hopkins medical campus.
- Greenmount + Better Waverly — north of Mount Vernon; mid-tier risk; the Greenmount corridor itself.
- Pigtown (Washington Village, south-west of Camden Yards) — mixed; gentrifying east blocks; western blocks elevated risk.
- Westport + Mount Winans (south-west) — small communities adjacent to Cherry Hill.
- Belair-Edison + Frankford (north-east) — mid-tier; not tourist destinations.
- Routes tourists sometimes drive through: West North Avenue, MLK Boulevard, Pennsylvania Avenue, Edmondson Avenue, Park Heights Avenue — daytime fine for through-driving; don't park-and-walk.
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