We asked where downtown Baltimore is. Chaos ensued.

What parts of Baltimore should be counted as downtown? When we found a litany of definitions from government and business leaders, we wanted to help decide once and for all.

We asked readers to assist by sending in their own maps of what they consider to be downtown. Nearly 700 of you weighed in. But “downtowns” varied widely, a Banner analysis of reader submissions found.

One response spanned nearly a third of the city. Another included only a few dozen blocks centered on the Chesapeake Shakespeare Co. theater.

But among the chaos, a few trends emerged.

To see what areas were most commonly designated as downtown, we overlaid your maps and broke down which areas appeared most often. (Imagine a Venn diagram of two maps, then scale that up to include the 680 drawings we received.)

Most agreed on a core area: Four in every five maps included a helmet-shaped zone that stretched from the Jones Falls Expressway and President Street in the east to Howard Street in the west, and from Saratoga Street to just south of Pratt Street, including the Convention Center and hugging the Inner Harbor’s northern edge.

As one reader said, “Downtown ends when the tall buildings end.”

Dozens agreed, pointing out downtown’s role of driving economic activity.

“Where do people spend their time when visiting ‘downtown’?” asked another reader. “The convention center certainly, the museums and aquarium for sure, the NYE’s fireworks, parade routes, etc.”

Less than 10% of map-drawers included any area north of the University of Baltimore campus, south and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, or east of Henderson’s Wharf Marina in their drawing of downtown.

One reader on why the western edge is so pronounced: “Fremont Ave is the western border because MLK was built by racism to divide.”

Readers were clear about certain landmarks, too: The University of Maryland Medical Center made the cut in more than half of all submissions, while less than one in six maps counted the new T. Rowe Price headquarters as being downtown.

Baltimore famously embraces hyperlocal labels. Planning department boundaries describe nearly 300 neighborhoods citywide — an average of nearly four in every square mile.

So how did readers’ definitions square with the official borders?

Readers overwhelmingly chose three municipal neighborhoods as the main building blocks: the “Downtown” neighborhood itself (more than 85% of all maps included most of its area), plus the confusingly named “Downtown West” and “Inner Harbor” (each of which made the cut in four out of every five submissions).

Some pushed back on the Inner Harbor being included, though.

One reader called the Inner Harbor its “own thing,” the site of government and office buildings. “Seems void of culture and fun things to do,” they wrote.

Consensus on what is ‘downtown’ dipped farther and farther east along the waterfront, with steadily decreasing shares of maps including Harbor East, Harbor Point and then Fells Point.

How often readers head downtown appeared to influence the maps they drew, too.

Those who reported spending four or more days per week downtown were twice as likely to include Canton in their maps as the lowest-frequency visitors. Those who said they venture downtown often tended to draw maps that stretched farther northeast, too: The group included Upper Fells, Washington Hill and Dunbar-Broadway at notably higher rates than other readers.

All three groups — infrequent, moderate and frequent visitors — tended to agree that some of the most distinctive neighborhoods close by were not part of downtown: Mount Vernon, Federal Hill and Little Italy were left out of at least three-quarters of all the maps.

“My status as a resident of the county certainly colors this understanding,” wrote one reader. “Even for other cities, I don’t think of ‘downtown’ as a place where people live.”