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Let's compare our Washington Monuments, shall we?

No doubt you're familiar with the stark, serious jab of white that towers over the District of Columbia's pristine green mall. But if you head just 30 miles north to all-too-often overlooked Baltimore, you'll find the original item. Jauntily priapic in the midst of the simultaneously swank and funky neighborhood known as Mount Vernon, the original Washington Monument beckons all who search for a kicked back, stress-free weekend. (Or even a one-day escape in the midst of a D.C. pilgrimage).

Designed by Robert Mills—the very same architect who, 33 years later, created its southerly follow-up—Baltimore's Washington Monument is a handsome, but decidedly less power-flaunting, piece of work than Mills' famous D.C. obelisk. You'll find no hard, lofty lines of abstracted idealism here, just a handsome 178-foot column, topped with a marble depiction of General Washington submitting his resignation to the Continental Congress in Annapolis.

There you have it. The symbol of this city: A guy at the top of his game. He's worked hard, but now its Miller Time.

A D.C. weekend can end up feeling fraught with obligation. Patriotic duty. Formalized tourism. Baltimore's civic boosters have every right to crow about their city's high-end institutions (including several truly world class art museums and a fine symphony), but this is also the kind of unbuttoned town that welcomes visitors to shrug off sophistication and listen to the crack of the bat, the hammer on the hardshell, and the laughter of kids running along the harbor's edge.

Start in Mount Vernon's narrow patchwork of little hillside parks. You may well want to duck into The Walters Art Gallery with its grand staircases, marble pillars and works from ancient Egypt to 19th century France. Or spend a few hours whiling through the area's eclectic, unpretentious antique and curio shops (over 70 dealers are show their wares along two blocks of Howard Street, Mondays through Saturdays). Kitsch treasure to keep an eye out for: mugs, buttons and other choice souvenirs from the esteemed career of that great son of Maryland, Spiro Agnew.

From a morning in Mount Vernon, it's a bracing 20-minute amble south through the Cathedral Hill neighborhood—with lots of great 19th century architecture to take in—and along the edge of the an attractive, contemporary downtown business district to reach the diamond that has become Baltimore's new crown jewel.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards (333 W. Camden Street, 410-685-9800) is a crackerjack monument both to baseball and urban living. Completed in 1992 and owned by the city, the brick-faced retro-styled stadium with its ideal sightlines and unique double-decker bullpens kicked off the current trend toward new baseball-dedicated parks, inspiring developers in Cleveland and Denver among other cities. Oriole Park has all the nostalgic charms of a Fenway or Wrigley Field, with one overwhelming advantage for home fans: The downtown office buildings you can see over the center field fence are just a five minute walk from the action.

Even if there's no ballgame when you're in town, Oriole Park offers a behind-the-scenes guided tour that, in and of itself, fulfills some boyish sportsfan fantasies—including visits to the scoreboard controls and announcer's booth.

Baseball's most legendary player hailed from Baltimore, and, in fact, the site of a cafe that Babe Ruth's father once owned is now smack in the middle of the Oriole Park's center field. Two blocks away—and not razed to make way for Maryland bluegrass playing turf—is the Babe Ruth birthplace, which now features a modest museum (216 Emory St., 410-727-1539). Also at Camden Yards is the home the only major league sports team named for a poem. Who knows what longtime Baltimore resident Edgar Allen Poe would have made of the rather spooky jocks-meet-nerds convergence of the Baltimore Ravens?

For die-hard sports tourists who just can't get enough—and ex-laxmen looking to loosen up a few good memories—a quick side trip may be in order to check out the Lacrosse Hall of Fame Museum (113 West University Parkway, 410-235-6882). While small, the hall of fam

After the Yards, walk your athletic appetite over to Federal Hill, where a multi-racial mix of blue collar workers and young professionals happily center their neighborhood around the rowdy melting pot atmosphere of the Cross Street Market (Charles & Cross Streets). Packed with fishmongers, green grocers, bakery stalls and sandwich stands, many of whom have operated their small businesses for several generations, the enclosed market, which dates back to 1846, is altogether authentic. While there are nods to contemporary life in the availability of sushi and heat-at-home meals, there's a sense of bustling workaday authenticity here that's a refreshing change from the pre-fab gloss of more calculated sightseers' marketplaces like Boston's Faneuil Hall or the L.A. Farmers' Market.

At the rear of the Cross Street Market (intersection of Cross and Light Streets), you'll find it well worth your while to wade into the three-deep crowd that gathers around Nick's seafood stalls (410-685-2020) waiting for a seat at the ice-strewn oyster bar or just elbowing clear some counter space to dig into a just-caught flounder sandwich or a cardboard bowl heaped with mussels or Chesapeake bay crab legs, washed down with a $5 quart of Clipper City, Woodpecker or other microbrews. Nick's, strong with the smells of beer and brine festooned with five American flags and one Bud banner, is the kind of place that makes you feel like a regular in about five minutes. There's a strong temptation to bag the rest of your Baltimore plans and sit here making new friends, swapping off-color jokes and doing serious damage to the world's crustacean population until the10 p.m. weekend closing time.

Only the seediest tourist lures of Las Vegas are better known for crabs than Baltimore and, all over the city you'll find opportunities to wield a mallet or nutracker and dig into the sweet, firm flesh of Maryland hardshells. If you're terribly slothful or completely ravenous, you can skip the shell game and order a crabcake. Just remember that picking enough crabmeat from shells to build a burger sized mound is a labor-intensive business, so if you want someone else to do it for you, you should be prepared to pay handsomely.

Yes, you can find a four buck crabcake in Baltimore, but buyer beware—they've got much more to do with cake (breadcrumbs, egg and other binders) than crabmeat. It takes a bare minimum of $6.50 to have a shot at something sublime. If you want to eat your crabcake like a genuine lazy Baltimoran, forego the cocktail sauce and dress it with bright yellow hot dog mustard.

While crabcake price fluctuations are easily explicable in terms of ingredients, varying tags on stalwart steamed hardshells are based almost entirely on dining environment. Manly men should be sloppily satisfied to come in under ten bucks at stand-up shacks like Nick's, but to spend twice that much for waiter service and high maritime style, make dinner reservations at Obrycki's (1727 E. Pratt St., 410-732-6399, closed mid-December through February). Even dyed-in-the-wool locals admit that the 54-year-old tourist-friendly institution makes for a great evening out. But they'll wag a finger and warn you about the curt service at overrated Phillips (Light Street Pavillion, 410-685-6600), another seafood mecca popular with spendthrift out-of-towners.

It's to Baltimore's great credit that one can spend a couple very busy and satisfying days in town without visiting the most popular recreation area, the famed Inner Harbor. But in fact, despite the generic tourist trap trappings of the centerpiece Harborplace (It's a mall, gang, its just another goddamn mall), the sparkling waterfront setting, replete with old Navy boats and submarines docked and available for touring, helps even the most mundane food court achieve a little bit of transcendence. Still, the best reasons to hit this part of town, so densely packed with attractions that it is clearly the place to go if you've just got a single day in the city, are two world class institutions, remarkable for their blending of excellent entertainment and painless edification.

The better known—and Baltimore's most popular destination—is the National Aquarium (501 E. Pratt St., 410-576-3800). With none of the juvenile pandering of a Seaworld, the dramatic pyramid-shaped layout pulls visitors along a series of ramped exhibits through a kaleidoscopic array of undersea and amphibian life, from tiny gemlike poison dart tree frogs to eerily glowing neon anemones to the steel blue waters of a terribly toothsome shark tank. At the pyramid's base is a remarkable open pool, aswim with dozens of haunting gray rays gliding across the water; at its peak is a miniature rainforest, humid, green and chattering with tropical birds, monkeys, iguanas and sloths (No, they don't feed them crabcakes).

One of the greatest—and most underpublicized attractions—in the mid-Atlantic states lies just across the Inner Harbor from the aquarium. Grab a water taxi (These shuttle boats will take you on unlimited trips around the harbor throughout the day for only $2.50—$3.00) and make an aqueous beeline for the eye-popping and mind-boggling American Visionary Art Museum (800 Key Highway, 410-244-1900). The vibrant, provocative paintings, sculptures and unnameable media hybrids showcased in this privately funded funhouse of a museum are all the creations of self-taught artists with no formal training. The viewing atmosphere is informal, too, a festive array of often wacky and sometimes stirring works by backwoods preachers, prison inmates, urban hermits and other ingenious eccentrics ferretted out by the Visionary's amazingly insightful curators (This is one of the only museums you'll ever visit where you'll find the explanatory signage almost as interesting as the art itself).

And leave room in your schedule for lunch, dinner or a spectacular Sunday brunch at the museum's Joy America Cafe. "Visionary chef" Peter Zimmer serves up food fit for the Wizard of Oz, so exuberant in its color and plate arrangement that you'll feel an urge to frame your meal rather than eat it. Every dish is an unlikely collage of ingredients, but don't be afraid: the intimidating 19 words of "Cinnamon and Chocolate Grilled Chicken Breast with White Bean and Winter Hard Green Flautas and Dried Papaya Mint Jelly" can be summed up in two, "Wow! Delicious!"

No visit to Baltimore would be complete without proper homage to native son, Barry Levinson, whose film and TV work has done much to keep his hometown in the public eye over the past two decades. You'll find the soundstages for Homicide along with many of the show's neighborhood locations along Thames Street in the old cobblestoned shipbuilding area known as Fell's Point. While suffering from a bit of frat boy overkill in the atmosphere, Fells Point remains Baltimore's unchallenged locus of weekend barhopping. Make sure the Cat's Eye Pub (1730 Thames St., 410-276-9866) is on your evening's route, so you can join in on the raucous singalong music by Dogs Among the Bushes and other local bands. Close out your night's carousing with the quintessential Levinson tribute, breakfast (with gravy-drenched wet fries) at a genuine Baltimore diner. There's none more authentic—or cheaper—than the fabulous Sip 'n' Bite (2200 Boston Street, 410-675-7077).

When you step out onto the sidewalk, the muse of black coffee coursing your pleasure-fatigued veins, stare out over the harbor waters to Fort McHenry. Over 200 years ago, the besieged ramparts of this very edifice inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star Spangled Banner." That ought to fill you with as much patriotic fervor as anything you'd ever find in Washington, D.C. And so, guilt-free, you can rest assured that you've made a fine choice for your weekend getaway.

Baltimore is a monumental good time.