Famine ships, Chesapeake fishermen, and the Irish and Italian communities who built Maryland's great port city
Baltimore was the second-largest point of entry for Irish Famine immigrants in America, receiving direct ships from Cork throughout the catastrophic years of 1845–1852. At the same time, Genoese and Ligurian fishermen were establishing the Italian community that would become one of America's oldest Little Italys — drawn to the Chesapeake Bay for the same reasons that had brought their counterparts to San Francisco's waterfront.
The city's Irish and Italian communities built on the waterfront, worked the docks and the oyster canneries, laid the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and created neighbourhood institutions — St. Patrick's Broadway, St. Leo's Church, the bocce courts on Stiles Street — that have survived into the present century.
Where Famine-era Cork and Kerry emigrants first stepped ashore — the shipyards, the oyster canneries, and the parishes of east Baltimore's original Irish community.
East of Fell's Point along the harbour — the Irish working families of the canneries and tin box factories who made Canton Baltimore's most enduringly working-class neighbourhood.
Baltimore's southern Irish stronghold — where Famine survivors and their children built a community around St. Mary Star of the Sea and the Cross Street Market.
Baltimore's most densely Irish working-class neighbourhood — named for the pigs driven through its streets to the railroad stockyards, and home to generations of Irish railroad labourers.
One of America's oldest continuously inhabited Italian neighbourhoods — the Genoese fishermen, Sicilian immigrants, and bocce courts that define Baltimore's Italian heritage.
East Baltimore's immigrant melting pot — Calabrian and Sicilian workers alongside Polish, Czech, and Lithuanian families, centred on Eastern Avenue and Holy Rosary parish.
Where the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-America liners docked — the principal arrival point for hundreds of thousands of German and Eastern European immigrants to America.
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