I copied this article from the New York Times website because I thought it may interest some on this list. March 11, 2001 Baltimore Journal: Shrine Reconstructs a Lost City of the Irish By FRANCIS X. CLINES <http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif> <http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/2001/03/11/national/11iris.1.jpg> Susana Raab for The New York Times Trees and shrubs have overrun part of St. Peter's cemetery in Baltimore, where Thomas Ward was examining a tombstone. B <http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/b.gif> ALTIMORE, March 7 ù A century's intrusion of wild trees and impenetrable bramble has cracked and toppled the gravestones of Finnegan from Galway, Murphy from Cork, and thousands of other urban pioneers resting all atumble in St. Peter's once grand Irish immigrant cemetery. "Their descendants moved out to the suburbs, and when they hear how bad things are here they get excited and promise to do something," said Thomas Ward, touring the woeful burial ground of a once vital working-class throng. These 19th-century Irish built and ran the old Baltimore & Ohio railroad and made a lilting ghetto of southwest Baltimore. "But families looking for their roots are more likely to fly to Ireland to search the cemeteries rather than come here into the city where their old ones are," Mr. Ward added sardonically. The suburban Irish-Americans will of course be journeying in by the vanfuls as celebrators in the city's annual St. Patrick's parade. But this is small comfort for Mr. Ward, a 74-year-old retired judge and son of a B&O railroad man. He fears the power of time to obliterate his people's 150-year- old traces. Mr. Ward and a group of city preservationists are ambitiously restoring five working-class row houses on Lemmon Street, an alley block behind the railroad's old engine roundhouse where the immigrant Irish once teemed. Mr. Ward wants the Irish Shrine at Lemmon Street, as it is called, to be a more impressive tribute to the true past of his people than the usual display of parade-day Irishmen in green plastic derbies and fishermen's sweaters. Through a glass-wall vista from the backyard, near the outhouse that is to be restored, Mr. Ward plans for visitors to see a three-floor diorama of an Irish immigrant family of two parents and eight children. He plans a scene of hope, humility and accomplishment in depicting refugees from the Irish famine of 150 years ago who built an American future for such as Mr. Ward. "A hundred years from now, I want tourists to know about the people who lived, worked, worshiped and died here, the people who built the railroads," said Mr. Ward, more mindful than most Irish-Americans of how their history is fading. Census figures show a 45 percent drop across 20 years in the number of Americans ù currently 22 million ù who claim some Irish heritage. Those who identify Irish-American history with clichTs about "the troubles" back home are missing an entirely positive swath of contributions, including "the tremendous Irish presence," as Mr. Ward puts it, in the earliest history of American railroading and southwest Baltimore. The old neighborhood of Lemmon Street attracted many of the 66,000 Irish immigrants who poured into the city during the famine. St. Peter the Apostle Church, built with the help of volunteers from the railroad, reigned supreme with its abstinence movement, the Society of the Divine Thirst. The parish is still active, a few blocks up from Rowley's pub, which was opened in 1847. Rowley's made a point of closing every year on St. Patrick's Day because "the family didn't want to see an Irishman drunk and reeling in the streets," said Patrick Rowley, descendant of the founding publican. Mr. Rowley currently tends the pub's original bar, a city treasure on Pratt Street where locals no longer send their children around to "rush the growler" for take-out tins of beer. These days, as affluent young professionals seek old worker housing to rehab, the pub is called Patrick's and is billed as "Baltimore's finest Irish cappuccino and wine bar." "And this year, for the very first time in history, we'll be open St. Patrick's Day," said Mr. Rowley, breaking into laughter as he explained why, "because we want the money." No one is more pleased by this adaptation than Mr. Ward, a former city councilman who can measure the retreat of the city's "disenchanted" Irish precinct by precinct. The Lemmon Street houses were built in 1848 and the last of the old Irish lived in them until a generation ago. They were to be torn down until local preservationists won possession. The B&O roundhouse is now a museum in a neighborhood tinged with daguerreotype charm, from St. Peter's to the old Hollins food market. "It was the church, the pub, the market, the railroad and, of course, the workers who made it all work," said Mr. Ward, speaking across a glass of Harp lager at Rowley's. The pub's old wood bar gleamed, more upright than the tombstones of St. Peter's. Lately, Mr. Ward noted, a group of nuns has begun hacking away at the cemetery overgrowth in hopes of restoring the memory of the old Irish. "The neighborhood will be the shrine," he said.