For 50 years, Greeks have made their way to Kentrikon, a shop on Eastern Avenue where they come to buy Greek music and trinkets, wreaths for weddings and christening ribbons after babies are born.
Only now there is a new draw, and new customers. "Musica Latina de Venta Aqui," reads a sign visible from outside Kentrikon - "Latin music sales here."
"The majority of people coming into the area are Hispanic," says owner Nitsa Morekas, 67, explaining her decision to branch out. "It's like Greektown international now."
The split personality of the city's Greek enclave is everywhere. Outside of Charro Negro, a bar that opened this year, the sign remained for Mylos, the Greek restaurant that it displaced. At El Artista barbershop, the sign on the door proclaims, "Greektown Barbershop," the hours and days written in Spanish.
As the march of Latinos continues to stretch east from Fells Point, Greek coffeehouses now sit alongside Latino bakeries and longtime restaurants like Ikaros and Acropolis share attention with one named Habanero Grill. Yet residents say that members of the two communities keep largely to themselves.
Baltimore's Latino population increased by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2007, a time when the city's overall population declined. In August, the Census Bureau estimated that nearly 16,000 Latinos now live here, though community advocates say the true figure is at least 50 percent higher. There are no figures for the number of Latinos in Greektown, but residents and organizers estimate that a quarter to a half of its residents are immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and Mexico.
The pattern of Latinos taking over older ethnic communities is common across the country. Little Italys become Little Perus. "The new immigrant populations are going in where they can find both a sense of community and also a place where they can be successful, and it makes sense for them to congregate in the sort of same ethnic, same background communities," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "And there is a kind of upward and outward mobility of some of the older groups."
Gloria Hertzfelt, a Mexico City native, remembers a different Greektown. The 77-year-old resident, better known as Dona Gloria, came 57 years ago. She recalls being one of the only Latinos at a time when other residents didn't want their children playing with hers.
