Hopkins Hospital

It is the institutions that Baltimoreans take for granted that will revive this city.Gov. William Donald Schaefer said as much to a gathering of Sun executives last month as he recounted how, in the years preceding the Inner Harbor triumphs, he had to remind residents that their city held gems like Fort McHenry.Vice President Al Gore repeated that theme in a meeting at The Sun yesterday to discuss the recently designated $100 million empowerment zone. Marylanders may take for granted Johns Hopkins Hospital, but the vice president speaks of the world-renowned institution with the reverence of a father whose child was saved there.

An apartment developer from Northern Virginia recently broke ground on a 304-unit luxury building just south of the Johns Hopkins medical campus in East Baltimore. The five-story complex will be called Jefferson Square at Washington Hill. It is being constructed on a plot located between N. Wolfe and N. Washington streets off E. Fayette Street that used to be the site of the low-income Chapel NDP Apartments, which was razed in 2006. The McLean, Va., based developer of the new structure, Jefferson Apartment Group, also manages properties in Washington, Philadelphia and Florida.

Dr. Milton J. Layden, a retired psychiatrist, died of complications from Parkinson's disease Sunday at the Jewish Convalescent Home in Pikesville. He was 90, and lived in Northwest Baltimore and Guilford. He practiced on the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and saw patients at his office in the Wynnewood Towers Apartments on Cold Spring Lane. He wrote Escaping the Hostility Trap, a book published by Prentice-Hall in 1977. Born in Baltimore and raised on Whittier Avenue, he was a 1930 graduate of City College, where he played on the tennis team.

Police on Thursday identified the man found fatally shot in Northeast Baltimore two days ago. Travis Jennings, 29, who lived in the 1600 block of N. Warwick Avenue, was pronounced dead at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He had been found by police in the Lauraville neighborhood, hours after police received an emergency call reporting gunshots near the 4900 block of Morello Road at 2:30 a.m. They found Jennings about three blocks away in the 2600 block of Southern Avenue.

Jordan McKelvin, 14, hopes to turn her scores on golf greens into dollars to fund research and battle childhood diseases. The Westminster High freshman and only girl on the Carroll County school's golf team has launched Birdies for Babies to benefit Johns Hopkins Children's Center. She hopes to raise about $10,000 as well as awareness for the life-saving research and dedicated care that the hospital offers its patients. "I want to do something involved with children, something to help children," she said.

An overhaul and expansion of the Johns Hopkins Hospital security force will be regarded with relief by the thousands of people who work at and visit that sprawling East Baltimore institution every day. A world class hospital deserves a first-class security force, and the step-up in security is long overdue. A number of brazen attacks have occurred this year. A medical student was raped, a physician kidnapped, a professor robbed at knife-point in her office.Located at the corner of Wolfe and Monument streets, the hospital is on the fringes of a neighborhood that has grown steadily poorer over the years.

It is now acknowledged that Johns Hopkins Hospital made a financial blunder in selling its health maintenance organization to Prudential Insurance Co. in 1989 under terms that will cost it millions every year of this decade. It is also acknowledged that Hopkins compounded this mistake by filing a $50 million bad-faith conflict-of-interest suit against Prudential that it had to retract under humiliating circumstances.This unhappy development, however, does not alter the fact that the Johns Hopkins Health System and the Johns Hopkins Medical School remain this city's premier institutions, with a global reputation for excellence and leadership.

Priscilla Dorsey Howard, who volunteered for many years in the social services department at Johns Hopkins Hospital, died Sunday of heart failure at Goodwin House Retirement Home in Alexandria, Va. She was 98.Miss Howard, who was the daughter of John Duvall Howard and Mary Greenwood Smith Howard, had lived at the Alexandria nursing home since 1974.The former Mount Vernon resident who was raised in Bolton Hill was a 1917 graduate of the Bryn Mawr School and made her debut at the Bachelors Cotillon.

Almost 1,000 doctors responding to a survey by U.S. News & World Report ranked Johns Hopkins Hospital among the best in the nation for 13 of 15 specialties -- earning it the magazine's designation as the best hospital overall.In earning that distinction, Johns Hopkins edged out three other hospitals with wide reputations for excellence: the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minn.; Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston, and the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.Rounding out the top 10 were: Cleveland Clinic; Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C.; Stanford University Hospital in California; and University of California, San Francisco.

An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun incorrectly identified a woman arrested in a false billing scheme as a former employee of John Hopkins Hospital. In fact, the woman was a former employee of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.* The Sun regrets the errorsA former employee at Johns Hopkins Hospital was arrested yesterday on charges of stealing more than $260,000 in an elaborate scheme that spanned nearly five years.Valerie Aquilano, 41, was arrested early yesterday in her Hamden home.

Plumes of billowing smoke above Johns Hopkins Hospital were visible for miles Wednesday as a ventilation unit caught fire above an 11-story campus building. The fire broke out at about 10:30 a.m. at 550 N. Broadway - an office building generally called Building 550 - and was contained in about an hour. No one was injured and the building's damage was limited to the roof area, said Chief Kevin Cartwright of the Baltimore City Fire Department. Fire Battalion Chief Ron Hudgins said a unit in the building's cooling tower atop the brick structure malfunctioned, sparking the one-alarm blaze.

A Woodlawn man and his girlfriend have pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft charges in a federal case that compromised the personal information of more than 250 people - including doctors who applied for fellowships at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where the girlfriend worked. Derrick Hill, 52, was the "ringleader" of a group of four people - including his girlfriend, Renee Cabell, 51, and co-defendants John Coffey and Tawney King, who have also pleaded guilty - that stole more than $188,000 in cash, merchandise and services through their scheme between August and October 2009, according to a statement from the Maryland U.S. State's Attorney's Office.

A 15-year-old boy was shot in the leg about 7:12 p.m. Monday in or near a housing courtyard not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore, extending a string of violence that saw eight people shot in the city over the weekend. Many recent shootings in the city have involved teenagers. The boy is expected to recover from his injuries, police said. They had no motives in the shooting late Monday. At the scene in the 700 block of Wharton Court, which is lined by two-story homes, two separate areas were blocked off with police tape.

A local minister vowed Saturday to investigate the death of a man who police said ingested narcotics during an arrest attempt in Baltimore and later died at a nearby hospital. "There are some sharp differences between the accounts of the eyewitnesses and what we're hearing from the police," said the Rev. C.D. Witherspoon, local leader of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference. At about 7:20 p.m. Friday, officers were attempting to arrest a 46-year-old man for a narcotics offense near the intersection of East Biddle Street and North Montford Avenue, when the man consumed drugs, said Detective Donny Moses, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department.

Arline Kaye Howdon, who was chief cytologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was known nationally and internationally for her work in the field of cytopathology and education, died July 20 of lung cancer at her Harper House condominium in Cross Keys. She was 91. The former Arline Kaye was born in Manhattan and in her childhood moved with her family to Miami, where she graduated from high school. She was a student at Duke University when she left in 1941 to marry Dr. William M. Howdon, a gynecologist who served in the Army Medical Corps.

In the latest example of Baltimore's aging infrastructure's causing damage to city streets, a large sinkhole opened on East Monument Street near Johns Hopkins Hospital on Wednesday afternoon - causing a stretch of the road to be closed and nearby businesses to be evacuated. The hole, estimated to be about 2 feet wide, 6 feet long and 20 feet deep, closed East Monument about 1 p.m. between North Patterson Park Avenue and North Montford Avenue, while a strong smell of gas forced businesses to close and brought Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. repair crews to the scene.

An article in Friday's editions of The Sun misstated the amount of money appropriated by the state toward a new comprehensive cancer center at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Maryland General Assembly has authorized $30.5 million for the center.The Sun regrets the error.The Johns Hopkins Hospital has received the single largest gift since its inception 106 years ago -- the pledge of $20 million from the Baltimore-based Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation toward the construction of a clinical building for its comprehensive cancer center.

For generations, patients entering Johns Hopkins Hospital walked past an oil painting of the founder and a marble statue of Jesus Christ. In the building that Hopkins opened this spring, they see blue and green rhinos, a flying ostrich and a purple cow jumping over 28 moons. The playful sculptures help differentiate the new building from its 19th-century predecessor, which seems hopelessly stuffy by comparison. But there's much more to the new Hopkins Hospital — Baltimore's first $1 billion building — than its sculptural menagerie.

When Johns Hopkins Hospital officially opens its new, $1.1 billion building Tuesday, sick children will find a cobalt cow with legs the color of grass and a butter-colored head floating above their heads, poised to jump over a fanciful "moon. " The new hospital won't just provide state-of-the-art health care. It will also provide state-of-the-art art. The 500 original paintings, sculptures and murals, created by more than 70 artists from around the U.S., are on display throughout both the children and adult towers in the new facility.