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Two Homeless Residents Make Sparrows Point Census Tract the State's Loneliest
By Kate Alexander
Series: Many Faces, One Maryland
SPARROWS POINT - The last two residents of Sparrows Point have been
flushed out.
But not before the Census Bureau found them last year, living along
the
railroad tracks under a highway overpass, with Bethlehem Steel smokestacks as
their vista.
The unidentified homeless people have since moved on, but their
presence
in the area last spring made census tract 4522 the least populated of
Maryland's
occupied census tracts.
So the entire demographic breakdown of the tract is this: two
non-Hispanic
whites, over age 18.
In what was once a thriving residential community, those two people
represented the last vestige of a population in this sprawling industrial
area.
They lived between the noisy traffic above and the pungency of creosote
wafting
from the railroad ties below.
No longer, though. The tract's two residents were asked to leave
shortly
after the census count because it was dangerous for them to be living near
the
tracks, said Sparrows Point Police Sgt. Paul Gratz.
That they were included in the census count at all was a remarkable
feat.
It was the result of a widespread effort to find people with unusual
living places, according Robert Schultz, the regional Census Bureau official
who
oversaw the enumeration of Targeted Non-Shelter Outdoor Locations in
Maryland. On March 29, 2000, scores of counters fanned out across the region
during
the pre-dawn hours to areas where homeless people had been spotted. With the
assistance of homeless advocates, soup kitchen providers and local social
services officials, they woke the homeless from their slumbers to have them
fill
out the census forms. A shower kit was offered as incentive.
"Probably 90 percent of the places we went to (on the street) nobody
was
there," Schultz said last year. "But we wanted to get that 10 percent. . .we
want to count every single homeless (person) out there."
Up until 1975, this now people-less tract of land was a bustling
company
town settled by the Pennsylvania Steel Co. in 1887 and subsequently purchased
"lock, stock and barrel" by Bethlehem Steel in 1916, said Baltimore County
historian John McGrain.
This neatly arrayed town was once referred to as the "spotless
suburb,"
McGrain said. The company paid for a school, churches and fire and police
departments, but it would not permit a saloon. For that, the workers had go
to
the city.
"It was a very nice place to live," McGrain said.
The town was razed in 1975 to make way for a blast furnace, said Bob
Crandell, plant property coordinator for Bethlehem Steel.
The county's planning office claims to have permits for residential
units
in the census tract where Crandell says the blast furnace now sits. The
planning
office concedes that it may be wrong.
Copyright © 2001 University of Maryland College of Journalism.
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