Middle East is a neighborhood in the heart of East Baltimore, Maryland. It is the site of a conflict between residents and the city's plans for creating a biotech park to serve nearby Johns Hopkins Medical Center. The neighborhood has suffered from extensive urban decay and housing abandonment, increased crime, and the effects of the Baltimore riot of 1968. Its residents are mainly lower income African Americans; the neighborhood was a filming location for the Baltimore-based HBO drama The Wire. Middle East is also noteworthy as being a location for the filming of scenes of the television series Homicide: Life on the Street and the 1991 film Homicide (no relation to the TV series) featuring Joe Mantegna. The swath of land between Johns Hopkins Hospital and Frank C. Bocek Park, which includes much of Middle East, is often referred to as the "Down the Hill" neighborhood by local residents. History The neighborhood formerly had a white working-class Czech-American majority and is home to St. Wenceslaus Church, a historically Czech parish that is now majority African-American. The Middle East neighborhood and surrounding areas were then known colloquially as "Little Bohemia." By 1969, the Czech-American immigrant community in what is now the Middle East neighborhood was predominantly composed of ageing homeowners who lived alongside more recently arrived African-American residents. However, many of the older white Czech-Americans harbored racist attitudes towards black people. According to a reporter with 'The Baltimore Sun', "The older people of Bohemian extraction still live in the houses they own...but they share the neighborhood with black people whom they do not seem to appreciate or understand." This was the last generation of Czech-Americans to remain in Little Bohemia in large numbers, with the neighborhood transitioning into a predominantly African-American neighborhood by the 1970s and 1980s. The name "Middle East" came about in 1978, when low-income African-American residents of the neighborhood requested funding from the city to repair the urban decay. There were 200 vacant homes in Middle East in 1978. Over a period of three years, $800,000 of federal grant funding was allocated. As of 2019, only a few traces of the Czech-American community still remain, as many Czech-Americans have moved to the suburbs primarily due to white flight and the decline of industrial manufacturing jobs. St. Wenceslaus is a thriving parish, as the ethnic character of the congregation has undergone a gradual shift from a mostly white working-class