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three towns in 1745, two of which - Oldtown and Fells Point - retained distinct
identities into the late 1920s and beyond as downtown neighborhoods. By the last
half of the nineteenth century, the Baltimore area was dotted with small, distinct
villages and communities centered on an industry or group of industries. By the
1930s these nuclei, such as the former cotton mill towns of Hampton and
Woodbury (founded in the 1830s) in the north, and company-organized industrial
towns like Canton (founded in the 1828) on the northeast side of the harbor, or
Brooklyn (established in the 1880s) far to the south on the Middle Branch of the
Patapsco River, had been transformed into as urban working-class neighborhoods.
They retained much of their original character, however, and many of their
residents continued to work at the local factories and workplaces. Indeed, D.
Randall Beirne argues that this "industrial-linkage" largely accounts for the
remarkable persistence of many of these neighborhoods. But it was not only the
industrially-linked working-class neighborhoods that persisted. Even the wealthy
commuter villages of the late nineteenth century, like Roland Park, Mount
Washington, and West Arlington, and those that had been laid out in the early
twentieth century, such as Guilford and Homeland, continued as cohesive, semi-
?o
independent entities, despite their new status as suburbs within the city limits.
Demographically, neighborhoods, especially the working-class
neighborhoods, were often defined by both ethnicity and by class. The more recent
European immigrant ethnicities — Jews, Poles, Russians, Italians, Lithuanians -
tended to reside in the working-class residential belt around the harbor, sometimes
in relatively ethnically homogeneous communities like Little Italy, sometimes in
more mixed neighborhoods like Old Town or Locust Point. By the late 1920s,
though, many in these proletarian ethnic communities were migrating to areas
formerly inhabited by more affluent "natives" and longer-resident nationalities.
Many Eastern European Jews, for example, moved to sections of northwest
Baltimore, following the earlier route of the German Jews, and tended to establish
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