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Johns Hopkins destroyed his private papers so thoroughly that no credible biography exists of the Baltimore Quaker titan. One of Americas richest men and the largest single shareholder of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Hopkins was also one of the citys defining developers. In The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins, Antero Pietila weaves together a biography of the man with a portrait of how the institutions he founded have shaped the racial legacy of an industrial city from its heyday to its decline and revitalization. From the destruction of neighborhoods to make way for the mercantile buildings that dominated Baltimores downtown through much of the 19th century to the role that the president of Johns Hopkins University played in government sponsored "Negro Removal" that unleashed the migration patterns that created Baltimores existing racial patchwork, Pietila tells the story of how one mans wealth shaped and reshaped the life of a city long after his lifetime.
About the Author
www.anteropietila.comFROM HELSINKI TO HARLEM"You never arrive" Here is a nice write-up about my newest book http://baltimorestyle.com/our-haunting-past/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I first saw America's shores in May 1964 from the deck of the M/S Finntrader. I was a twenty-year-old aspiring journalist from Finland wanting so badly to spend that summer in the United States -- the summer of Lyndon B. Johnson's re-election campaign, civil rights strife and of the New York World's Fair - that I worked my ways across on a freighter. I came from a country so homogeneous that eye and hair color marked the chief differences among its four and a half million people. No blacks lived in Finland in those days, and only fifteen hundred Jews. New York's polyglot metropolis stunned me. While reporting one day in Harlem, I found myself naked and sweating in an old Finnish steam bath operated by an immigrant from Jamaica. It had been a popular gathering spot among residents of the Finnish community, which thrived in Harlem from the 1910s until the 1950s. Few traces of that population of several thousands survived. Rival socialist halls, including one with an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley, were long gone, as were Finnish churches.One vestige still remaining was a hat shop on 125th Street belonging to an elderly Finnish woman, who had stayed after other whites ran. Another relic was the steam bath, with its black owner, a professional masseur, at Madison Avenue and 122nd Street.Harlem exemplifies succession, which is the sociologists' term for ethnic, racial and economic neighborhood transition. In the space of four decades between the 1870s and 1910s, that section of New York City went from a white upper-class community of American-born residents to one populated by recent Irish, Jewish, German, Italian and Scandinavian immigrants. Soon thereafter, as a result of white abandonment, Harlem became African American and Puerto Rican, as Gilbert Osofsky chronicled in his 1971 classic, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. Racial succession is not over, either. Starting in the late 1990s, Manhattan's overheated real estate market made Harlem's values so irresistible that whites began returning to live on some streets north of Central Park. The phenomenon of changing neighborhoods fascinated me.In 1969, after receiving my M.A. degree in journalism from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, I found an urban observatory in Baltimore, a declining but still-great city trying to recover from the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The city and many of its residents were in a defeatist funk. Racial tensions flared, white flight to the suburbs continued; smokestack industries kept shutting down. Yet even among the gloom and doom there was a sense of excitement among those who saw the potential. One of my first reporting
