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fairly homogeneous neighborhoods. Others, like the Italians, tended to disperse in
several directions, and to end up in more ethnically diverse neighborhoods. As
sections of newer European ethnic group communities began to move away from
the harbor area, the outlying longer-resident white ethnicities in turn tended to
move further to the North and West, often to the new "rowhouse communities" like
the one along Edmondson Avenue, studied in detail by Edward Orser. There
largely skilled working class and lower petty bourgeois families of German and Irish
background, most at least two generations away from immigration, inhabited more
spacious "daylight" rowhouses with a window in every room.

By the 1920s, wealthier (and more "native") groups were moving even
further out. As Sherry Olson has pointed out, before the First World War, sixty
percent of those listed in the Social Register lived in the upper-class communities of
Mt. Vernon and Bolton Hill, located northwest of downtown Baltimore; by 1932
only about a third remained, with many fleeing beyond the city lines to the far north
countryside in Green Spring, Worthington, and Dulaney Valley. Catonsville in
Baltimore Couniy to the east, established as a commuter village around the same
time as Roland Park, and Towson in the county to the north, became increasingly
populous and connected to the city. For urban historian George H. Callcott, the
1920s were a watershed. Modern suburbanization became an established
phenomenon as Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County were decisively
pulled within Baltimore's orbit and became suburban counties, experiencing for the
first time a growth rate higher than the state as a whole.^

Generally speaking, then, there was a good deal of geographic mobility in
the city of Baltimore and into its new ancillary suburbs in the post-World War I
period. However, the one ethnic community that did not experience significant
geographically mobility within the region during these years was the African
American community. Blacks were concentrated in three areas of the city: west of