This part of the city is notable principally for helping to keep Baltimore's '''homicides''' per capita among the highest in the nation, and unsurprisingly has been used as a filming location for both the Wire and more extensively for Homicide: Life on the Street. Further out into the northeast, especially along '''Harford Road''' (brought into the popular consciousness by John Waters' recent film, ''A Dirty Shame'', is where you will find more interesting, ''very'' off the beaten path points of interest.
East Baltimore is also home to the '''Johns Hopkins Medical Campus''', which is somewhat controversially demolishing the blighted neighborhoods that surround it in order to accommodate its ever rapid expansion. Displaced residents are not pleased, but Johns Hopkins is probably the single most powerful institution in the city, and the hospital is likely to get its way! Sensing neighborhood change in the wake of the expansion, real estate developers have been buying up properties by the block, looking to turn them into condos. The city government is quite interested in renovating areas so close to downtown (for the new tax base that would bring), particularly in the borderline ghost town of '''Old Town'''. A yuppified East Baltimore is at least a possibility in the future, but what a contrast that would be to the present reality!