Butchers Hill is near more gentrified sections of Fells Point, Patterson Park, and Johns Hopkins Hospital.

[5] The area had been home to humans for thousands of years[6][7] when the first people of European heritage arrived in the 17th century.

[25] Frederick Douglass wrote that when he first arrived in Baltimore in 1826 as an 8-year-old enslaved child named Fred Bailey, he stepped off a sloop from Talbot County at Smith's Wharf and was instructed to take a flock of sheep to Butchers Hill.

[35] Instead of large blocks of rowhouses like in other neighborhoods, development in Butchers Hill progressed in more modest efforts of small clusters at a time.

[39] From the 1920s to the 1940s, Butchers Hill was a thriving Jewish neighborhood home to dentists, doctors, lawyers and merchants.

[43] Because of its proximity to large defense plants in southeastern Baltimore, the population exploded with many larger homes being subdivided into multiple small apartments to accommodate more workers.

[44] In the post-war years, like many urban areas nationally, there was disinvestment,[45] the suburbs attracted many city dwellers, and the Jewish residents of Butchers Hill largely moved to the northwest portion of Baltimore.

[51] For a while, the neighborhood's name had fallen into disfavor and was just referred to as "East Baltimore" or the area around Patterson Park.

It is one of the neighborhoods where full-time employees of Johns Hopkins may apply for "Live Near Your Work" grants toward down payments on homes.

Butchers Hill is a popular neighborhood for students from the nearby Johns Hopkins medical campus.

Butchers Hill is home to many Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Ukrainian-Americans, as well as African-Americans, Lumbee Native Americans, and a growing Hispanic and Latino population.

[55] In 1999, the third book of Laura Lippman's series focusing on Baltimore detective, Tess Monaghan, was entitled Butchers Hill.

[57] Monaghan is at the helm of a fledgling detective agency and has had to open up shop in a neighborhood described as having had a prosperous past with beautiful homes, but is currently lower income and plagued by crime.