Open Works Returns With Gingerbread Rowhouses For The Holiday Season

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Open Works is backmost this vacation play with the cleanable Baltimore-themed decoration, a gingerbread mentation of the city’s iconic rowhouses.

Okay, technically the houses are made of graham crackers alternatively of ginger bread, but the vacation contented is inactive the same. Kits for the confectionary operation project person graham crackers–including 1 with windows, a doorway and a cornice, each laser-cut–for the facade and walls, icing to clasp it each together, and candy for decorating the home.

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The shaper abstraction created the kits past twelvemonth aft having to cancel its yearly cooky speech owed to the pandemic.

“It truly became a beloved assemblage event, and we were bittersweet we weren’t going to beryllium capable to proceed it,” said April Danielle Lewis, manager of assemblage and civilization for Open Works.

Open Works posted 50 kits for merchantability and they rapidly sold out, Lewis said. They made different 100 and those went fast, too, Lewis said.

As of Tuesday morning, the enactment had already sold much than 100 kits, Lewis said, and plans to grow its archetypal tally of 150.

“Last twelvemonth it was truly amusive to spot the things radical did. Some folks went supra and beyond,” said Lewis, pointing to architects who made elaborate gardens oregon decorations for their rowhouses and 1 idiosyncratic who replicated the Mount Vernon mural depicting iconic histrion and resistance queen Divine.

Lewis suspects the kits are truthful fashionable due to the fact that they harvester Baltimore’s emotion of kitsch and things that notation the city’s culture.

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“For me, increasing up, either beryllium it successful schoolhouse oregon astatine home, we ever did the gingerbread kit. I bash consciousness similar it’s precise overmuch a contented of the season,’ she said. “And I deliberation it’s chill we’re capable to enactment a rotation connected it to springiness it a Baltimore feel.”

This year, Open Works is donating $5 from each $30 kit toward a Greenmount West Community Center fundraiser to assistance a longtime resident, Rosalind Bell, reconstruct the location she has lived successful for astir 3 decades.

Bell precocious had the extortion repaired, but an “unscrupulous contractor dismantled her home,” according to the assemblage group.

Structural problems were discovered aft Bell was approached astir having a mural painted connected the broadside of her home, Lewis said.

The Greenmount West Community Center is hoping to rise $150,000 to hole Bell’s home.

“We are committed to providing assistance which allows seniors to property successful spot with dignity and grace,” said Kisha L. Webster, enforcement manager and co-founder of the Greenmount West Community Center.

Greenmount West is 1 of 3 neighborhoods that marque up the Station North Arts & Entertainment District, and portion galore Baltimoreans cognize the country for its galleries and artists spaces,  the vicinity is the vicinity that it is due to the fact that of the folks earlier us,” Lewis said.

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“And I deliberation it’s important to assistance sphere folks who person helped make a vicinity we each enjoy,” she said.