Ask yourself why a working-class mill community, once wary of outsiders, ended up producing Baltimore's most joyfully over-the-top holiday spectacle. Hampden began as a mill village in the early nineteenth century, when textile mills were built along the Jones Falls creek that runs through the valley below. The mill workers lived in the rowhouses on the surrounding hillsides, and for most of the twentieth century Hampden was a white working-class neighborhood with a strong identity and a certain wariness of outsiders.
The neighborhood became famous for what it is not: unlike most of Baltimore's other neighborhoods, it resisted demographic change for decades and developed a reputation for insularity. But Hampden also developed a creative subculture in the 1990s that aligned with the city's film legacy — John Waters, Baltimore's most famous filmmaker, was a regular presence in the neighborhood, and The Avenue, Hampden's main commercial street, developed into a strip of vintage stores, art galleries, and eclectic restaurants. The annual 34th Street Christmas light display, which began informally in 1947 and grew into one of the most elaborate block-wide holiday installations in the country, captures something essential about the neighborhood: an exuberant, handmade, slightly excessive celebration that is entirely serious in its lack of irony.
In December, every house on the block blazes with lights, plastic santas, and decorations that have to be seen to be believed.