Penn Station fills your view, one of the finest remaining Beaux-Arts railroad stations in the United States and Baltimore's gateway to the Eastern Seaboard for over a century. Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station was completed in 1911, designed by the firm of Kenneth Murchison, who was a student of the great Beaux-Arts architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart and who brought the full vocabulary of the style — monumental scale, Roman arched windows, elaborate ornamental stonework, and a grand vaulted waiting room — to this commission. The station was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad at the height of that company's power, when rail travel was the dominant form of intercity transportation and station buildings were the cathedrals of the industrial age.
The waiting room inside, with its arched ceiling and clerestory windows, was designed to make arriving in Baltimore feel like an occasion. Penn Station serves the Northeast Corridor — the most heavily traveled rail line in the United States — and the trains that stop here connect Baltimore to Washington in forty minutes and to New York in three hours. A bronze statue of Thurgood Marshall, the Baltimore-born civil rights lawyer who became the first African American Supreme Court Justice, stands outside the station entrance.
Marshall grew up in Baltimore, attended its segregated public schools, and was rejected from the University of Maryland Law School because of his race — which led him to Howard University Law School and ultimately to the Supreme Court.