The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy That Shaped an American City

Antero Pietila shows how one man's wealth shaped and reshaped a city long after his life, from the destruction of neighborhoods to make way for the dominating buildings in Baltimore's downtown to the role that Johns Hopkins University played in government sponsored "Negro Removal" causing the city's existing racial patchwork.

ISBN-13: 9781538116036

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers - Inc.

Publication Date: 11-02-2018

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

Antero Pietila's thirty-five years with the Baltimore Sun included coverage of the city's neighborhoods, politics and government but also seven years of reporting as a correspondent in South Africa and the Soviet Union. A native of Finland, where he graduated from Tampere's School of Social Sciences, Pietila became a student of urban racial rotations during his first visit to the United States in 1964. He later obtained a Master of Arts degree at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (2010). He is a contributor to The Life of Kings: The Baltimore Sun and the Golden Age of the American Newspaper, as well as an ebook, Race Goes To War: Ollie Stewart and the Reporting of Black Correspondents in World War II. He resides in Baltimore, MD.

Table of Contents

Author's Note: My Baltimore Story Quilt ix

Acknowledgments: Writing This Book xv

Part I The Pragmatic Opportunist

1 Johnsie's Baltimore 3

2 The Civil War: Blue and Gray 25

3 A Brush with Death 43

4 America's Richest Spinster 61

5 Doctors Rob Graves 77

Part II The Racial Dynamics of Modern Baltimore

6 The Monumental City 95

7 Governments Create Slums 115

8 Mobtown in the 1950s 137

9 Activism Builds Up 155

10 A Cat of a Different Color 171

Part III Pushing Out the Lumpenproletariat

11 A Citadel of Hope 191

12 Rough Road to Renewal 209

13 The Knockers 229

14 The Price of Poison 241

Notes 251

Index 295

About the Author 317

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