“YOU can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style,” John Waters once noted about his hometown. Maybe that’s why Baltimore’s trumpeted glass-and-steel Inner Harbor development, with its chain restaurants, neon-loud amusements and brand-name shopping, feels so counterintuitive as a symbol for the city. But walk in any direction and the city’s charm reasserts itself. Indeed, Baltimore’s best draws tend to be left-of-center: offbeat theater, grandly decrepit neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification, a world-class museum devoted to outsider art and a dive-bar culture that must be one of the nation’s finest.

Friday

3 p.m.

1. DIVINE INSPIRATION

There may be no better introduction to Baltimore than the extraordinary American Visionary Art Museum (800 Key Highway; 410-244-1900; avam.org), or AVAM, devoted to the work of self-taught and outsider artists. AVAM’s collection ranges in scale and tenor from a 10-foot mirror-plated sculpture of the drag icon Divine to “Recovery,” a moving self-portrait of an anonymous British mental patient that was carved from an apple tree trunk before he committed suicide in his 30s.

7 p.m.

2. CRAB HAPPY

Call it the great democratizer: it’s hard to find a Baltimorean who doesn’t enjoy wielding the mallet. L. P. Steamers (1100 East Fort Avenue; 410-576-9294; lpsteamers.com) is a purist’s crab house. There, waiters dump buckets of fresh-caught Old Bay-coated steamed crab onto brown paper for diners to whack, smash, pry, shuck and suck out the tender white meat. For two people, a dozen mediums ($50) and a pitcher of Baltimore’s signature swill, National Bohemian a k a Natty Boh ($9) should do the trick. Snag a table on the restaurant’s upper deck and watch the sun set over one of Baltimore’s best views.

10 p.m.

3. ARTS AND DRAFTS

Several arts districts have popped up in Baltimore in the past decade. The most successful has been Station North (www.stationnorth.org), the downtown area inhabited by artists, actors and students (and dropouts) from the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art and University of Baltimore. Over the past year, a project called Open Walls (openwallsbaltimore.com) has commissioned works from more than 20 street artists, whose murals animate the neighborhood’s ramshackle elegance. You can see an art show, hear local sounds or catch a screening at the Metro Gallery (1700 North Charles Street; 410-244-0899; themetrogallery.net) or the Windup Space (12 West North Avenue; 410-244-8855; thewindupspace.com). Yet when it comes to night life, what Baltimore does best is the dive bar. There may be none better than Club Charles (1724 North Charles Street; 410-727-8815), a grimy, kitschy little joint with a masterful jukebox and regulars like the electro-pop ringleader Dan Deacon.