Richmond's Shockoe Bottom sold an estimated 350,000 people into slavery between 1830 and 1865 -- the country's second-largest domestic slave market, after only New Orleans. In 1903, immediately north of that same ground, Maggie Lena Walker chartered the first bank in American history founded and led by a woman of any race, trained by a professional-class pipeline the neighborhood built for itself. A federal map graded that neighborhood a bad investment in 1937. A federal highway cut it in half two decades later. Richmond still runs an institutional pipeline for founders today -- it has just moved a few blocks and changed its subject -- and a federal grant is now paying to study whether Jackson Ward itself can be reconnected.