BALTIMORE — The vacant Baltimore Freedom Academy in Washington Hill is living out its final years as somewhat of a magnet for graffiti artists to practice their craft.
Large tags — signatures like “HANK” and “EBB” — add a mix of funky colors to the doors of the empty school complex, which closed in 2013 and is now eyed for demolition.
Some people enjoy the work, but Lynn Scott, 66, takes the vandalism there personally. She attended the school in the 1970s, when it was Lombard Junior High School, and said she “just busted out and started crying” when she first saw the school coated with graffiti. She said her former school has become a “great-big, giant, huge eyesore.”
Department of Public Works teams work throughout town to remove graffiti from city-owned property and public rights-of-way, prioritizing 311 reports but also proactively hitting problem spots. After a tumultuous time during the coronavirus pandemic, when the already-small group of removal workers briefly had their specialty axed from the city’s budget, their team has been growing. But so has the volume of graffiti.
City data shows that Baltimore was inundated with thousands more 311 reports related to graffiti last year, causing the city to staff up its removal teams. Up until last year, the city would log a few hundred graffiti-related requests each month. In 2024, the monthly average was over a thousand.
“It has been an uptick,” said Kevin Macartney, president of the Charles Village Civic Association. In recent years, the North Baltimore neighborhood has had the most calls for graffiti-related issues. “It’s been a topic of discussion amongst our neighbors,” he said.
The 311 data shows that graffiti services are requested the most in the city’s creative enclaves: Hundreds of this year’s service records are centered in neighborhoods in and around the Station North Arts District. With artistic havens like the Maryland Institute College of Art and the CopyCat building nearby, the soul of the scene is Graffiti Alley, the backstreet off North Howard Street in Charles North, where bold expressions of street art are not only accepted but encouraged.
As the year warms up, the number of graffiti reports each month is increasing, but cases are getting closed slightly quicker thanks to the three pairs of graffiti removal workers. More than half of the graffiti removals logged in the 311 system are proactive work on tags spotted by public works crews, though the city encourages residents to report graffiti through the 311 system.
Residents interviewed in recent weeks said that there certainly is some graffiti that adds to Baltimore’s character, and some neighborhoods get their vibrancy from unauthorized spray-painted works. There’s a gray area — where the line sits between street art and blight depends on the work itself, where it’s located and who you ask.
Heidi Younger, an illustrator and Mount Vernon resident, said that as a creative person, she enjoys seeing the layers and textures of walls covered in graffiti.
“I feel like living in an urban environment, it’s just par for the course,” she said.
She said that graffiti can also destroy beautiful things, like when a marble staircase is tagged, but sometimes, the ugliest part is the paint used to cover it up — there’s this “awful gray color” often used by the city to cover up vandalism on concrete.
The tools that removal teams use depend on the type of graffiti and surface it’s on, but they typically use either a sandblaster to knock off tags or cover them up with the paint.
For years, the city’s graffiti removal team was only a two-person show, though their lack of presence was widely felt during the pandemic, a time that Younger noted “it got really bad.”
When Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott took office, his administration revived the team and has grown it, though with a catch: They no longer remove graffiti from commercial buildings and businesses. They also briefly handled graffiti on private residential properties “as a courtesy,” said DPW spokesperson Mary Stewart, but there are liabilities and complications associated with removing graffiti from private residences.
“We try to stick to only city-owned properties if possible,” she said.
Those changes have been particularly difficult for small businesses in graffiti-heavy areas — failing to keep a property’s walls graffiti-free can lead to citations from the city’s housing department.
In Jonestown, a few blocks away from Lynn Scott’s former school, developers have had major plans to overhaul the historic Central Avenue cable car barn. As a development team gets ready to physically rehabilitate the warehouse, which once held vehicles from Baltimore’s defunct cable car system, they’re now advertising commercial leasing opportunities on signs and webpages that show what it could look like once finished.
But in recent months, only one major addition to the building has been visible from the outside: The name of an infamous street gang is scrawled in big, white letters several times across its historic brick facade.
The “MS-13” graffiti was finally removed last week. Baltimore Police said they had not received any calls about it.
Removing graffiti from the historic building required a “more nuanced approach,” said Sam Bohmfalk, development manager for Cross Street Partners. The developers rehabbing the car barn had spent several weeks testing different products to strip away the graffiti without using paint or aggressive measures that could damage the historic masonry, she said.
“Ultimately, we plan to restore the historic masonry to its original splendor so continuing to paint over the graffiti is not a long-term solution,” Bohmfalk said in an email.
The Car Barn building is still technically owned by an entity of the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. It was cited by city code enforcement in December for graffiti on the outside. Bohmfalk said that the developers, Cross Street and Beatty Development, were now waiting on approval from the Maryland Historical Trust to apply an anti-graffiti coat on the often-tagged brick exterior.
In Charles Village, “some of the residents around here wouldn’t mind so much the ‘nicer’ looking stuff,” Macartney said.
On the ground, neighborhood groups are trying to figure out how to address the recent uptick in graffiti without the city providing its services to businesses.
Macartney said that his community group has heard “a lot more” potential solutions, like establishing a second Graffiti Alley, seeking more coordinated help from the city on removal or getting some kind of system in place through the neighborhood’s benefits district. Some of Baltimore’s special benefits districts, areas where property owners pay a tax surcharge in exchange for additional services, have graffiti removal services that extend to both residents and businesses. But there are only a handful of those districts, and they are largely centered in the city’s wealthier core.
Graffiti done without permission can be considered malicious destruction of property, a misdemeanor under Maryland law, and Baltimore City Code makes spray painting public buildings and personal property a municipal violation. Informally, there’s an understanding among graffiti artists about where spraying is appropriate, followers of the scene have said. Vacant buildings and alleys are acceptable, but other people’s tags and personal vehicles are off-limits.
Younger, the illustrator, said that she’s been excited by murals going up around the city, noting the “really lovely” work that went up on the pillars underneath Interstate 83 for this year’s Artscape.
There could be a larger-scale solution in that — “getting some of the graffiti artists to channel their creativity into doing something that’s more positive to the community,” she said.
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