Creative ReUse

When I’m not teaching, or blogging, I have a soft spot in my heart for something called upcycling. I like to create new things out of old things. Maybe it comes from all my years as a preschool teacher, turning egg cartons into alligators and old lunch bags into puppets. I do know that I love to rescue old things as a way of reducing waste. Why go out and buy new junk when you have so much old junk to play with?

So I was deliriously happy to learn of  Scrap B-More, a store that is run completely on donations of craft materials and sells them at a huge discount. Their goal is to keep unwanted items out of landfills. I loved their sign:

2, 832 chihuahuas! That’s impressive!

I scored some burlap ribbon, a large quantity of white cording, and a book on 1950’s advertising wth gorgeous, glossy illustrations which will be perfect for collage and decoupage. It’s fun to poke around and see what they have. It also makes you realize that you have stuff you aren't using that you’d like to donate. You can learn more about Scrap B-more on Facebook. 

        

After feeding our crafty appetites, my daughter and I popped over to Fell’s Point for some lunch. She wanted to show me another kind of creative reuse: the Rec Pier Chop House in the Sagamore Pendry Hotel.  It’s fancy. Here’s the lunch menu.

    

Thanks to the immense front window we were able to eat lunch inside with an unobstructed view of our car, something you have to do al fresco in Howard County.

        

I think I’d like to live in this place!   

   

The food was delicious, the service was excellent, and the atmosphere and wall art are fabulous.

    

(It changes color.)  

The Sagamore Pendry Hotel will be known to many of you as the police station on the television show Homicide: Life on the Steets. Before that it was a Baltimore City recreation pier, hence, the new restaurant name.

I hope that, as Columbia ages, we’ll see more of our own examples of creative reuse. (Think Whole Foods from Rouse Building.) We’re seeing plenty of new construction these days, but what about some creative preservation? Can you think of a Columbia building that’s ripe for a new incarnation?