Michael Evitts, the vice president of marketing and communications at the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, was walking to work Friday morning when he spotted something strange on the sidewalk on Charles Street, just north of Conway.

And even in a city known for its quirks and the oft-repeated refrain of “Only in Baltimore...”, this oddity stands out.

It was a pile of cubed ham.

“That had to be the weirdest,” said Evitts, who tweeted the photo out on the city organization’s Twitter account with the caption: “You see a lot of things just walking around. Today, apropos of nothing, we found a pile of ham.”

Our sentiments, exactly.

Evitts’ tweet has been one of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore’s most successful, he said. As of Friday afternoon, the tweet logged more than 17,000 engagements on Twitter, over 100 retweets and more than 20 replies, many of them memes, ham-related gifs or puns (One Twitter user called it a “hambush”).

“We do a lot of serious work and we have men and women on the streets every day and I think they’ve seen weirder things like this, but it’s a rare moment when you come across a pile of ham,” said Evitts, adding that the pile had at that point, been untouched by insects and rodents. (He’s since put in a request with the partnership’s operations team to pick up the ham to avoid any pests.)

“What makes it satisfying is that people who see it seem to get the sublimely [ridiculousness] that we got out of it,” he said. People also seem to enjoy the fact that the ham is cubed.

As an employee of an agency that promotes living and working downtown, Evitts didn’t pass up the opportunity to use the cubed ham as a plug for Baltimore’s charms.

“You never know what’s going to happen in a vibrant city,” he said.

bbritto@baltsun.com

twitter.com/brittanybritto

BEST OF BALTIMORE INSIDER

Hold up, 'Hon': Baltimore's black vernacular youthful, dynamic if less recognized than 'Bawlmerese'

'Step' dance documentary is out to change the world's view of Baltimore

Drake dined at Azumi, requested new Jay-Z album be played on speakers