Opinion | Amazon and the Breaking of Baltimore - The New York Times - 0 views
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egional inequality has deepened across the country.
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Mr. Taylor, who started working at the plant in 1989 and spent the next 11 years there, wanted the bricks as part of his effort to reclaim the heritage of Sparrows Point. In the 1950s, Beth Steel, as locals call it, was the largest steel plant in the world, a dense skyline of chimneys and coal chutes abutted by a company town then home to more than 5,000 people.Mr. Taylor planned to use the bricks for a new lighted walkway at Sparrows Point High School. I was there because I had come to see Sparrows Point as emblematic of the transformation of the U.S. economy over the past few decades and the gaping regional divides that this transformation had produced.
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Which brings us back to Beth Steel. When it was riding high, so was its host city, Baltimore; in 1960, the city’s population was 939,000, the sixth largest in the country. By 1980, even after two decades of white flight, the city still boasted a population nearly 150,000 people larger than its neighbor 40 miles to the south, Washington. Baltimore had the region’s only baseball team, and hosted several major corporate headquarters, a superior symphony orchestra and three daily newspapers.
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