Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

A white six-masted tent roof spanning a harbor pier has been Baltimore's summer-concert landmark for more than four decades. Pier Six Pavilion at 731 Eastern Avenue sits on Pier 6 of the Inner Harbor, a city-owned open-air amphitheater with 4,600 places split between covered fixed seating and open-air positions at the water's edge. The venue opened in 1981 as the Harbor Lights Concert Pavilion, a temporary two-masted structure holding 3,133 on folding chairs. In 1990 the City of Baltimore hired Future Tents Limited - now FTL Associates - to design a permanent replacement, and the 4.9-million-dollar rebuild that opened in July 1991 raised the Teflon-coated roof to 70 feet across six masts, added a permanent concrete building with offices, a loading dock and five dressing rooms, and lifted capacity to 4,341. The seat procurement was a piece of civic opportunism: the planning committee persuaded the Maryland Stadium Authority to tack the pavilion's order of fixed orange chairs onto its own purchase of more than 48,000 seats for the new ballpark at Camden Yards, saving thousands of dollars. Naming rights have cycled through the decades - Pier Six Concert Pavilion from 1991, Cavalier Telephone Pavilion from 2004 to 2006, MECU Pavilion from 2018 to 2021 - before the original name returned. A 2016 agreement brought Live Nation and SMG in as co-operators and funded a 4-million-dollar renovation, installing a new tent and seats and nudging capacity to the current 4,600. In April 2026 the city handed operations and talent buying to a new partnership of Knitting Factory Entertainment and local promoter The Finn Group, keeping the pavilion in seasonal use from spring through early autumn. The setting does much of the work: the National Aquarium, the Hard Rock Cafe in the Pratt Street Power Plant and the restaurants of the Inner Harbor surround the pier, and concertgoers watch headliners with harbor water on three sides and the downtown skyline behind the stage.