Pigtown, Baltimore

The name dates to the mid nineteenth century, and it comes from exactly what you would expect. Hogs arrived from the Midwest by rail into the Baltimore and Ohio yards, then were driven on foot down Ostend and Cross Streets to the slaughterhouses in South Baltimore. Residents watched the herds pass their front stoops. The neighborhood stuck with the name.

The community grew up around railroad workers who began settling here in the eighteen thirties and forties, drawn by the yards and the cheap land south of downtown. By the eighteen seventies it was a dense working-class enclave of row houses and small factories. From the nineteen seventies, some official records called it Washington Village. Residents pushed back. The National Register of Historic Places lists it today under its original name: Pigtown.