Perched at the end of two piers in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the National Aquarium opened in 1981 as part of the city’s massive downtown redevelopment. At one time, the National Aquarium in Baltimore was associated with the older National Aquarium in Washington, DC (established in 1873), but the Washington aquarium closed in 2013 during a major renovation project to the Herbert C. Hoover Building, where it had been housed, in the basement, since 1932. Many of the exhibits and animals from the Washington aquarium were transferred to Baltimore.