Pigtown neighbors yarn bomb Washington Boulevard with colorful lamppost art

Pigtown neighbors are trying to make Washington Boulevard look and feel more like their own block, one yarn square at a time. Residents had until Sunday, May 31, to drop off handmade pieces for a lamppost yarn-bombing that will run along the corridor beginning near Barre Street, with the finished installation expected to stay up through the summer and possibly until the Pigtown Festival in the fall.

The project is being organized by a Pigtown committee working with SCRAP Baltimore, the creative reuse nonprofit that moved to Barre Street after opening in Baltimore in July 2016. Nancy Hotchkiss, SCRAP B-more’s site director and a longtime staff member who has been with the organization since June 2015, said the effort is meant to be community driven. Beginners can use starter kits, and SCRAP has also put together a YouTube tutorial so more neighbors can contribute without needing advanced knitting or crochet skills.

By late May, the group said it already had about 20 pounds of yarn squares ready for installation. The plan is to install them with volunteers and neighbors, a detail that matters in Pigtown, where Washington Boulevard is not just a commercial strip but the neighborhood’s most visible shared space. Pigtown Main Street, founded in 2000, has long described its mission as revitalizing that corridor, and the yarn project gives the block-by-block retail street a temporary public face shaped by the people who live around it.

That connection to place runs deep. Baltimore City says the Pigtown Historic District developed in the 1840s as a community for railroad workers along Columbia Avenue, now Washington Boulevard. The name Pigtown comes from the area’s pig transport and slaughterhouse history, when animals were moved by rail and driven through the streets to nearby packing plants. Today, the same corridor is being used to test whether low-cost public art can do more than decorate lampposts. It can also change how people use the street.

The timing fits into a broader neighborhood push around reuse and sustainability. Baltimore City’s Department of Public Works scheduled EcoLoop: Rethink. Reuse. Reimagine for Saturday, May 30, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Friends of Patterson Park, 27 South Patterson Park Avenue, with activities including textile recycling and creative reuse art. SCRAP Baltimore, which says it diverted 19 tons of material from the landfill in its first three years and logged more than 18,000 volunteer hours last year, is part of that same reuse ecosystem.

For Pigtown, the yarn bombing is also another layer in a corridor that already anchors the 23rd Annual Pigtown Festival, a late-September Washington Boulevard event built around pig races, live music, food, arts and crafts, and kids’ activities. If the lampposts draw people to pause, look, and linger, the project will have done more than brighten the street. It will have tested whether residents can stitch a stronger neighborhood identity into the everyday life of Washington Boulevard.