The Beginning

The oldest buildings in the Historic District are directly related to the 1828 founding of the nation’s first railroad, which secured its West Pratt Street site in 1830. Although the initial on-site operations were limited, as laborers worked to clear land and lay track westward to Relay, then on to Ellicott City, Frederick, and points west, car and engine building shops were soon established on Pratt Street.  Worker housing began to go up on both sides of Pratt Street in the 1830s, two-and-a-half story, late Federal-style houses like those seen in the 900 block of McHenry Street, west of Poppleton, or the two surviving examples on the north side of Washington Boulevard, at 810-12.

800 Block, W. Pratt Street

900 Block of McHenry Street, across from the B&O

View of B&O Roundhouse from McHenry Street

810 Washington Boulevard

Tags: B&O, Columbia Avenue, history, McHenry Street, Pigtown, Roundhouse, Washington Boulevard

An Overview and Boundaries of the Pigtown Historic District

The Pigtown Historic District comprises some thirty-six city blocks lying in southwest Baltimore, south and east of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad yards. Developing initially as a community for railroad workers in the 1840s, along Columbia Avenue (now Washington Boulevard), Ramsay, McHenry, and Poppleton Streets, the area grew rapidly to the south during the industrial expansion of the 1850s and 1860s. Small two-story houses were built for workingmen on the narrow streets running south of Washington Boulevard, with three-story gable-roofed, and then early Italianate houses lining Washington Boulevard and Scott Street to serve as housing for shopkeepers and upper-level managers. With the continued industrial growth of the area, the land lying south of Cross Street to Mount Clare was developed in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s as a community for workingmen.

Builders put up tidy, affordable two-story, two-bay-wide houses that could be purchased with the help of local building and loan associations. For more prosperous employees, a team of builders erected several rows of three-story Italianate-style houses on the south side of Cross Street, west of Scott. In the same decades builders put up rows of small houses east of Scott Street, both north and south of Cross, but only a few blocks of this housing survived twentieth century industrial expansion and the building of the Ravens football stadium, Martin Luther King Boulevard. The few surviving blocks east of Scott Street have been included within the boundaries.

Tags: Baltimore, historic district, history, Pigtown

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Tags: Architecture, history, maps, photos, Pigtown