“There’s a new breed that’s moving in,” Clarence Harris, who has lived in Hampden for almost 50 years, said from his front stoop, where he joked with neighbors and pointed out Killer, the orange street cat he called “Hampden’s mascot.” “I guess you’d call them yuppies. They’re always trying to buy my house.”

Baltimore has a history of being a Balkanized city, with neighborhoods often cleaving along ethnic and religious lines, said Elizabeth M. Nix, a history professor at the University of Baltimore. Hampden, she said, has always been slightly different, its identity forged by the workers drawn from the South and Appalachia to the jobs in nearby mills and factories, and its geographic isolation from the rest of the city, with a river, a highway, park space and the campus of Johns Hopkins University hemming it in.

“It was very much a place of its own,” Professor Nix said.

Not unlike many communities in America, newer generations in Hampden have been left to confront an ugly racial past. The neighborhood gained broader notoriety from news accounts of racially tinged episodes, including one in the late 1980s when a black family was chased out by white residents who broke their windows, threw rocks and hurled racial epithets, and another in 1987 when there was a melee outside of a school involving black and white students that community leaders described as an outburst of mounting racial tension.