Baltimore was already The Monumental City, thanks to its monuments. Then it was Mob Town, thanks to its mobs. For a while, that was enough.

But 50 years ago, Baltimore’s leaders decided that the city needed a new nickname, and Charm City was born.

Baltimore is apparently still charming, because the name has never been more popular. It has been parodied, celebrated and mocked — but more than anything, it has stuck.

The story starts in 1974, when the Baltimore Promotional Council Inc. proclaimed in a series of newspaper and magazine ads that Baltimore was “Charm City, U.S.A.”

According to archival news accounts, the nickname originated out of brainstorming sessions involving a few local admen and then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer.

The idea was straightforward: Baltimore has a lot of historical and contemporary charm, and if people visit the city, we will give them a charm bracelet.

Tourists could go around the city with their bracelets and collect charms from different sites like Fort McHenry. There would eventually be T-shirts, a radio jingle and a short film.

But its debut had rotten timing.

In a story titled “Chaos in Charm City,” Time Magazine called the campaign’s launch “remarkably ill-timed.” Multiple overlapping strikes by municipal workers were shutting down city services across Baltimore, a less than charming situation.

“Ripening mounds of garbage, growing ever gamier in the hot summer sun, piled up next to the city’s famed row houses. Temperatures in some jail cells rose as high as 110°, broiling the unsupervised inmates,” the magazine said. “Zoo officials started a rumor that they might have to slaughter small animals in order to feed larger ones.”

The strikes ended, but skepticism of “Charm City” remained.

The promotional council, a forerunner to the Baltimore Development Corp., cobbled together $40,000 in 1974 and $200,000 in 1975 to spend on the campaign, according to archival news reports.

One advertisement in particular drew criticism after it included a line about the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1812, perhaps the most famous event in Baltimore’s history because it inspired Francis Scott Key to pen America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

There was a problem. History buffs pointed out the bombardment actually took place in 1814. Not everyone appreciated the history lesson.

“What we were attempting to do was put together an ad that would help overcome Baltimore’s gross inferiority complex,” a person connected to the campaign told The Baltimore Sun.

By 1976, there was no more money to promote “Charm City, U.S.A.” The Associated Press declared, “‘Charm City’ is gone forever,” and said the campaign was “ill-fated from the start.”

Ira Glass, host of the radio program “This American Life,” grew up in Baltimore during this era, and he talked about the Charm City nickname in a 2014 episode, “No Place Like Home.” To Glass, it felt like “forced boosterism.”

“I have never met a single person who took this slogan seriously,” Glass told millions of listeners.

For a while, it appeared to fade away. When The New York Times ventured into Baltimore in 1980 to report on “Washington’s Brooklyn,” the Gray Lady made no mention of Charm City. Instead, the paper claimed that Baltimore was known as “the nickel city” because residents once drank so much 5-cent beer and ate so many 10-cent crab cakes that the federal government had to send truckloads of extra coins here.

The mayors after Schaefer came up with new nicknames for Baltimore. Kurt Schmoke said it was “The City That Reads.” To Martin O’Malley, Baltimore was “The Greatest City in America.”

But neither proved as durable as Charm City. Even as some people mocked or ignored the term, many more people started using it, from cake and ice cream shops to soccer leagues to a roller derby team.

The Baltimore Ravens unsuccessfully tried to trademark “Charm City” in 2022. Last year, Mayor Brandon Scott and his wife, Hana Pugh, named their newborn son Charm because the couple met at the city-sponsored music festival, Charm City Live.

Today there are more than 1,300 businesses and organizations registered with the state using “Charm City” in their title. While some are duplicates, there are even more businesses using a variation of nickname, like The Charmery in Hampden or Charm’s Market & Deli in Brooklyn.

The story of Charm City resurfaces every few years in publications like The Sun, Baltimore magazine and the news site you’re reading right now. That’s because the origin is often unknown to newcomers and younger Baltimoreans.

This summer, to mark the 50th anniversary, the Baltimore City Archives posted photographs of some of the original promotional materials for “Charm City, U.S.A” on Instagram.

Unfortunately, the archives don’t have any of the original charm bracelets from 1974 — and neither does Kathleen Loden Barbuti.

Her father, Daniel J. Loden, was the Baltimore adman who led the “Charm City” ad campaign. Loden died in 2004.

Barbuti, who is 75 and lives in Parkville with her daughter, said her father was a tall man who had “wonderful bushy eyebrows” and a creative mind that was always brimming with ideas.

Another local adman, Bill Evans, is credited with coining the term “Charm City.” It was Loden who spearheaded the ad campaign. He worked pro bono on the project, Barbuti said. The Lodens had a long family history in Baltimore, and Barbuti said her father especially loved downtown. He just wanted people to visit Baltimore and for Baltimoreans to be proud of their city.

The city in the 1970s was recovering from racial unrest. It was losing blue-collar jobs. There was a fear of crime. Families were leaving.

What the city needed, civic leaders and admen like Loden thought, was a rebranding.

Baltimore still faces some of the challenges it did 50 years ago, and yet many of its citizens have embraced the Charm City motto.

While Kathleen thinks her father might be disheartened to see downtown today, she is proud that many people continue to use the nickname he championed.

“My father loved Baltimore. He just loved Baltimore,” she said. “I brag about him all the time.”