Baltimore will have a drone show and a fireworks show to celebrate the Fourth of July this year, but they’ll be in different parts of the city.
Mayor Brandon Scott announced on Monday that the fireworks display will be held at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on July 4, with the fireworks beginning around 9:30 p.m. He said the best places to watch are the Inner Harbor shoreline, Federal Hill and Harbor East. Produced by the Mayor’s Office of Art, Culture and Entertainment, the event will include a variety of activities before the fireworks go off and some road closures starting at 8:30 p.m.
The separate drone show will be held as part of the Ninth Annual Cherry Hill Arts & Music Waterfront Festival, taking place on July 4 at Middle Branch Park, 3301 Waterview Ave. The festival runs from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., with the drone display starting around 9:30 p.m. It’s the first time the Cherry Hill festival has included a drone show as part of its festival.
The Cherry Hill festival is presented by the Youth Resiliency Institute in partnership with the Switching Lanes Adult and Youth Institute; the Westport Community Economic Development Corporation; the Cherry Hill Family Congress; the Southwest Baltimore Gateway Partnership and the Mayor’s Office.
Together, the events offer “something for everybody,” the mayor said. “From the Inner Harbor to Cherry Hill, we’ve got fun for the whole family.”
A “drone show” or “drone light show is an aerial display that uses a fleet of synchronized drones, each fitted with LED (Light Emitting Diode) light, to create patterns, shapes and animations in the air. The lights can spell out words or create images that tell a story or promote a cause or idea.
Baltimore paired a “custom-designed drone show” with a traditional fireworks display at the Inner harbor to ring in 2024. It also had a combined drone and fireworks show to celebrate Independence Day in 2024. It went back to a fireworks-only display at the Inner Harbor to ring in 2025.
Combining drones and fireworks was the idea of Todd Yuhanick, who was then serving as interim CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, after the University of Maryland Medical Center sponsored a drone show during Artscape 2023 to celebrate its 200th anniversary. The city went back to a fireworks-only Artscape celebration in 2024.
The theme of the Cherry Hill festival is “It’s Still About Freedom.” Asked what the theme of the Cherry Hill drone show will be, festival co-founder and coordinator Navasha Daya said “you’ll have to wait and see.”
Speaking from the Rotunda inside City Hall, Scott said he didn’t anticipate any security problems with the city scheduling multiple events on the same night. He noted that Baltimore recently put on the annual Artscape festival as part of the city’s ‘Downtown Rise’ initiative and often has more than one major event on the same day.
“These are events that we hold all the time,” he said. “I’ve been at both of these…I started going to Cherry Hill in 2019 and we’ve never had incidents.” The city just had Artscape “right outside these doors without major issues,” he added. “We will have the public safety plan and people in place.”
