In the halcyon 1950s, Hutzler’s department store employed 1,500 sales, office, and Colonial tea room dining staff. “Probably 2,000 during the holidays,” says Michael Lisicky, author of Hutzler’s: Where Baltimore Shops. “You went downtown to shop, lunch, see a show, go back, and shop again,” he says. “Lexington and Howard was the busiest intersection in the state.”

In a twist of fate hardly fathomable when the 140-year-old family business shuttered in 1989, that corner, specifically the former luncheonette basement of the old Hutzler Brothers Palace, is now home to one of the busiest “intersections” in the world. An estimated 25 percent of global internet traffic—including half of the emails, Amazon orders, Netflix streams, and iPhone downloads in the U.S.—pass through the stacks of underground AiNET servers there.

Many Baltimoreans know the backstory: In 1858, 23-year-old Abram Hutzler convinced his father, Moses, a German-Jewish peddler, to sign for credit so he could open a dry-goods store, which eventually set a record among American department stores for tenure at its original location.

Fewer know the current story: Deepak Jain, son of Indian immigrant parents, launched AiNET—originally a web-hosting company whose revenues now surpass $100 million—in his parents’ basement while attending Glenelg High School. (When he was a restless 6-year-old in a rural community without a lot of children nearby to play with, his parents had gotten him a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer to keep him occupied.) By 1994, while in theory a sophomore Johns Hopkins University pre-med student, Jain’s business was growing fast enough that he could pay his own tuition.