Baltimore is becoming the town that Harry and Jeanette Weinberg built -- or, at least, a town covered with their names.
Mercy Medical Center boasts a new Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Center to house its women's health and medicine program. In Waverly, a Harry and Jeanette Weinberg YMCA is to open next year. The Living Classrooms Foundation, which operates from a Weinberg center, is getting a new Weinberg pavilion.
Buildings at almost all major medical institutions in the city and Baltimore County bear the Weinberg name, from a cancer center at Johns Hopkins Hospital, to a planned behavioral health center at Kennedy Krieger Institute, to the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Cancer Institute at Franklin Square Hospital Center.
The University of Maryland Medical System has two buildings named for the couple. The newer, recently dedicated, contains operating and emergency rooms.
All of those names are no accident. Before his death in 1990, Harry Weinberg, landlord and philanthropist, decreed that any building for which his charitable foundation gave more than $250,000 would have the couple's name on it somewhere.
The size of the Weinberg foundation's assets has since doubled, to nearly $2 billion. It gives out nearly $100 million a year in grants. Weinberg required that half of the money go to building projects, and that makes for lots of Weinberg edifices -- so many that even the foundation staff can't say how many there are.
Bernard Siegel, a longtime Weinberg associate who became president of the foundation, estimated that his friend's name is on at least 65 buildings in the Baltimore area and that about a dozen more projects are in development.
"I said to him, `At some point, Harry, every building in the world is going to have your name on it,'" Siegel recalled. "And he got a big smile on his face."
There's a Weinberg residence at a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, a Weinberg independent living center in Kiev, Ukraine, and a Weinberg home for elderly women in Bombay, India. In Jerusalem, a Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation Rooftop Terrace overlooks the Western Wall. In the United States, there are buildings named for the couple from Arizona to Massachusetts.
There is a long tradition of naming buildings for benefactors. That's how the Johns Hopkins University, Sheppard Pratt Hospital and the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre got their names.
