City and state leaders are finalizing a long-term lease that will enable the Top of the World visitor attraction to stay in place for 20 years.
In anticipation of that agreement getting signed, representatives from Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration and Create Baltimore on Thursday outlined plans to renovate the space on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center Baltimore and launched a capital campaign to pay for the improvements.
Several dozen members of Baltimore’s arts and business communities gathered at the World Trade Center on Thursday for a presentation about the renovation plans, which are predicated on the approval of a long-term lease.
Proposed improvements range from installation of new flooring and lighting to updating of educational materials that were installed 30 years ago and contain out-of-date information about the city.
“Since opening in 1979, Top of the World has offered visitors a breathtaking 360-degree view of Baltimore, more than 400 feet above the city,” said a fact sheet distributed at the gathering. But “exhibits feature outdated facts, former mayors, and milestones that no longer reflect the Baltimore we know today…It’s time for a new perspective.”
Interpretive and cultural space
The Top of the World is Baltimore’s answer to sky-high observation galleries in New York, Chicago and many other cities where people pay money to go the tops of tall buildings to take in sweeping views.
“More than just an observation deck, the 27th floor also serves as an interpretive and cultural space,” said the invitation to Thursday’s gathering. “The five galleries surrounding the observation level offer visitors different perspectives of the city. Each direction tells a different story — from Baltimore’s industrial and maritime heritage to its transformation into a center for tourism, culture, sports, technology and the arts. Together, the galleries create a 360-degree portrait of Baltimore, connecting the city’s past with its present and offering a glimpse of its future.”
Located at 401 E. Pratt St., the 30-story World Trade Center Baltimore is owned by the State of Maryland and built on land sold to the state by the City of Baltimore. Since the building opened in 1977, the state has reserved one floor near the top, the 27th, for use by the city. The city has been permitted to occupy the space for a nominal fee over the years by a series of long-term leases that have survived changing city and state administrations.
Some insiders say former Mayor William Donald Schaefer asked state officials to give the city that floor in perpetuity in return for selling the valuable waterfront land for its office tower, but no one has provided documentation of any such agreement and it’s not reflected in state land records.
The last long-term lease expired on May 31, 2025. Before that lease expired, state officials notified city leaders that they didn’t plan to renew the lease and were looking for other ways to use the space.
In January of 2025, Murphy told the board of her organization, then known as the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA), that the attraction would have to close when the lease expired. Her announcement drew backlash from tourism officials and others who said the Top of the World was an asset to the city and shouldn’t close. In October of 2025, Murphy and Scott announced that the city had reached an agreement in principle with state officials to keep the Top of the World in place and that the city and state would negotiate a long-term lease to that effect.
In the meantime, the attraction has operated under a series of short-term lease extensions. The current lease extension allows the attraction to stay open until Dec. 31 while negotiations for a long-term lease are finalized.
The lease talks weren’t addressed during the presentation on Thursday, but Murphy and others provided information afterwards. Murphy and Kate Edwards, Deputy Chief of the Baltimore City Law Department’s Corporate Real Estate Practice Group, said the city is negotiating a lease agreement that would allow the Top of the World to stay in place for 20 years – longer than some of the past renewals.
They said the agreement likely will be structured as a 10-year lease to start, with a 10-year renewal option. An alternative would be a 20-year initial lease. Any long-term lease would have to be approved at public meetings by both the city’s Board of Estimates and the state’s Board of Public Works.
Edwards said the city is aiming to have the long-term lease submitted for approval by the two boards before the end of the year. Create Baltimore would operate the Top of the World on behalf of the city, with the Living Classrooms Foundation leading educational programming.
Upgrading the exhibit space
In conjunction with the lease negotiations, Create Baltimore officials are planning to upgrade the Top of the World to provide a better experience for visitors. Before they start construction, they want to have a long-term lease to justify the expense. Ziger|Snead Architects is the firm leading the design.
As presented on Thursday, plans for changing the physical space include: purpose-built gallery walls; a new acoustic louver ceiling system and lighting; updated flooring; updated viewers; updated restrooms; new benches; new finishes; a new information desk; an expanded gift shop and a redesigned back-of-house area. The design intent is to create “a fresh, contemporary visitor experience.”
Besides upgrading the flooring and lighting, the curators want to change the educational content to improve the experience for visitors and tell a richer story about Baltimore. They say the information and level of technology in the space are out of date because it was last upgraded when Kurt Schmoke was mayor, which was from 1987 to 1999.
One big improvement, according to the fact sheet, will be the addition of interactive digital kiosks providing information about the city below. Interactive maps will let visitors “zoom into any neighborhood – North, South, East, West – and discover history, culture, notable figures, and oral histories told through text, video and audio.”
With interactive digital displays, the fact sheet said, “Top of the World will bring Baltimore’s story to life – celebrating who we are today while preserving the people, places and moments that shaped who we’ve been.”
A second problem, planners say, is that many of the exhibits are geared toward out-of-town visitors and not so much for area residents, and they intend to change that.
At present, wording above the windows “will tell you how far you are from Toronto or from Rio de Janeiro, and that’s wonderful,” Murphy said. “But soon, we’re going to add lines that will also tell you how far you are from Edmondson Village and Turner Station and Park Heights and Westport and Frederick, Maryland, and Annapolis. And they’ll tell you the stories of those communities and their history and their people and the contributions through interactive kiosks, through digital walls and through storytelling in the voices of iconic Marylanders.”
The exhibit designers “definitely have some catching up to do,” she continued. “Since these walls were last updated, we’ve elected Wes Moore — twice as of two days ago — Maryland’s first Black governor. That’s not reflected on these walls. And [Lieutenant Governor] Aruna Miller, our first woman of color and first immigrant elected to statewide office, is not yet reflected on these walls. We have had four women mayors, including the incredible Stephanie Rawlings Blake who is with us today, but our exhibits haven’t been updated since before we ever had a woman mayor.”
In sports, “the celebrated Ravens’ second Super Bowl victory is not here,” she said. “We’ve watched Michael Phelps and Angel Reese and others carry Maryland with pride onto the world stage. We have to reflect that. And we’ve witnessed extraordinary achievements in science and medicine and business technology and in the arts. Maryland’s story is still being written, and the walls of this building should never be finished telling it. Our new technology will allow us to celebrate those achievements practically in real time.”
As part of the effort to expand education, planners say, there will be school group partnerships with the Living Classrooms Foundation, educator resources and programming for Baltimore City youth and their families. The indoor component of the 9/11 Memorial of Maryland, which occupies part of the space, will be preserved and expanded as well.
Murphy said she did not have a specific figure for the cost of improvements but that it would be “less than $5 million.” That’s higher than the figure of $500,000 that officials mentioned a year ago, but she said the scope of work has expanded.
The importance of arts and culture
Calvin Young, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, told the audience on Thursday that retaining the Top of the World as an attraction, and upgrading it, are part of a larger strategy by the Scott administration to treat arts and culture as economic development.
“The arts and culture community is very, very important” to the city, Young said. “Arts and culture truly is economic development, and now more than ever we are putting the resources and the investment into arts and culture that matches the outsize impact on the economy that it has.”
Young said the city has made great strides since state officials told BOPA two years ago they didn’t intend to renew the lease for the Top of the World.
“Top of the World was going to be a casualty,” he said. “As many of you know, we had announced that we were going to close this space. Frankly, if we had moved forward with those plans, you would be standing in office space right now, and this beautiful view and this asset that the city has had since this building was built would have been gone forever.”
Young praised Murphy for leading the effort to save the Top of the World from closing and negotiate a long-term lease.
“We were pretty set in the Mayor’s Office” about closing the space, he said. “But Robyn thought otherwise. Robyn said, ‘You should think about saving this,’ and she drafted a plan and submitted it to us and the mayor said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ So as we sit here today and talk about how this place is about to get redeveloped and this campaign of support is going to [lead to] a wonderful educational experience for our citizens who come to visit, I want everybody to know that it’s because of one person’s vision…and her name is Robyn Murphy.”
