Bloodsworth Read Online Free PDF

growth and transformation of a society.
    The first settler of the city of Baltimore is reputed to be David Jones, who in 1661 surveyed about 380 acres of prime land along the eastern bank of Jones Falls and then built himself a house on what is now Front Street. Irish immigrants and German-speaking settlers from Pennsylvania had already begun farming the rich Susquehanna sediment covering the rolling hills of Baltimore County near where the city eventually sprang up. Easy access to a port was essential to the farmers looking to trade with England, Europe, and the West Indies. Baltimore’s natural harbor, gouged deep by a glacial trowel, fit this need.
    Throughout the eighteenth century, schooners laden with corn and tobacco sailed from Baltimore, down the wide Chesapeake into the Atlantic, and returned loaded with sugar, rum, and slaves to sell. In 1784 Baltimore City’s first police force was formed. By 1790 the population of the city had grown to over thirteen thousand and had become a favored destination for immigrants sailing to America. Greeks, Italians, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, and others found their own neighborhoods and settled into city life or moved into outlying Baltimore County to farm or trade. In 1876 Johns Hopkins University opened its doors. And on August 16, 1893, Oriole pitcher Bill Hawke threw the first modern major league no-hitter defeating rival Washington 5 to 0.
    Inevitably, as the new industrial century took shape, as Baltimore grew into a major international port, its population rapidly increased and swarms of new neighborhoods pushed the city’s boundaries away from the water, westward, northward, and eastward. Passenger steamers, ferryboats, cargo ships, oyster dredgers, and sailing clippers filled the harbor. Trolley cars careened up the city streets and railroads expanded their networks of tracks. Roads and highways crisscrossed the landscape. Outlying towns wereswallowed up and absorbed by the urban spread. Crowded city neighborhoods gradually blended into crowded suburbs. In 1957 the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel opened, burrowing beneath the Patapsco River and Baltimore Harbor. Heralded as a marvel of modern construction, it allowed automobiles to travel from Washington, D.C., and points south directly north toward Philadelphia and New York on Interstate 95, without having to navigate the narrow streets and bottleneck traffic in the city. Interstate 95 was followed by Interstate 695, the Baltimore Beltway, which encircles the city with high-speed lanes. These roadways have become the conduit for millions of travelers. They also provide easy access to the many localities along their edges, places previously somewhat insulated from the outside world.
    One such area of Baltimore County, known as Essex, sits not far from the junction of these two major arteries, I-95 and I-695. Just a few miles east of the Baltimore City line, slightly north, and not far from the headwaters of Back River, this area contains a congestion of shopping centers, malls, roadways, small industrial buildings, and a host of working-class communities with names such as Rosedale, Rossville, Overlea, and Bluegrass Heights. Sandwiched between I-695 and Rossville Boulevard, and just north of Pulaski Highway and the Golden Ring Mall, sits a sprawling apartment complex of 356 units of squat, flat-roofed, two-story squares, all joined and running together in long, identical rectangular rows. These units border Bethke Pond and a low-lying wooded area, dense with thornbush and vine. The complex is known as Fontana Village. In the summer of 1984 Fontana Village received much unwanted notoriety as the scene of a terrible and brutal murder—a crime that spawned a statewide manhunt, led to one misstep after another by both the hunters and the man they accused, and rekindled a national debate over the propriety of the death penalty.
    T HE MONTHS OF July and August can be hot in Baltimore. Temperatures routinely run