To answer your question, no, there is no place better than Baltimore.
It's funny... I really love Baltimore for its heavy, dense wall-to-wall brick rowhouses and apartment blocks. These buildings have massive, solid, and relatively flat and impenetrable front facades.
I also love New Orleans (where I live now) because of its light, airy wood-frame houses that considerately step back a foot or two from the property line, allowing windows on all sides of a building. These buildings often have a porch or shutters or a portico, some architectural device to soften and blur the transition from outside to inside.