There are two stories behind the creation of John Moale’s drawing of Baltimore Town. One version is that sometime in the late eighteenth century, Moale (ca. 1731-1798) sat down and sketched from memory the Baltimore of his youth. The other account has the amateur artist sitting on the future Federal Hill and sketching the town from life in 1752.
Baltimore Town in 1752, by John Moale, MdHS museum collection, 1845.1.1.

Sitting down in a field or on a city bench, pulling out a sketch pad, and drawing a building or cityscape is today a lost practice, largely left to artists. In an era when you can access a digital map of the entire world, and then zoom in on practically any building on earth, a sketch of a house, or even a printed map of city, may seem almost primitive. The watercolor to the right, which could easily be mistaken for a child’s drawing, is actually the earliest existing depiction of Baltimore when it was still just a tiny backwater town. Merchant and land developer John Moale’s unfinished sketch is a document of 1752 Baltimore, then known as Baltimore Town, that although rendered in “shocking disregard…of the laws of perspective,” gives a sense of the architecture of eighteenth century Baltimore now almost entirely lost. While there are surviving examples of houses from the mid to late 1700s still standing in the city (and photographic examples of many now gone), none of the structures depicted in Moale’s “original and homely draft” remain.(1)

In 1752, Baltimore Town was a “small, straggling village,” of roughly 200 inhabitants who lived, worshiped, and drank in 25 houses, one church, two taverns, and a brewery.(2) The drawing captures the young town just prior to a boom period marking the beginning of 200 years of uninterrupted population growth that wouldn’t come to an end until 1950. In the 1750s the town’s commercial and residential possibilities began to attract a diverse group of immigrants. German and Scotch-Irish businessmen from Pennsylvania, French-Acadians exiled from Nova Scotia in 1755, and other immigrant groups traveled to the waterfront community in the hopes of starting a new life. By 1760 there were over 1200 inhabitants. Fourteen years later, on the eve of the Revolution, the population consisted of nearly 6,000 people living in some 560 residences.

Most of these dwellings were simple wooden structures, between one and two stories in height. The most common homes found in eighteenth century Baltimore were three or four bay-wide structures with gambrel roofs and dormers. Only four of the 25 houses pictured in John Moale’s original sketch were brick; in 1741, Irish immigrant Edwin Fottrell, using bricks imported from England, began construction on the first. The Fottrell house – the largest residence in 1752 Baltimore Town – was erected at what is today the northwest corner of Fayette and Calvert Streets.(3) Fottrell returned to his homeland sometime before 1755, leaving the residence unfinished and in a state of disrepair.

Edwin Fottrell house. Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16.

St. Peter the Apostle Church, constructed 1843, 11-13 South Poppleton Street, June 2013

The deserted home lay vacant for only a short time as it was soon occupied by a group of newly arrived French-Acadian refugees whose ship had appeared unexpectedly in the harbor. The refugees – part of a larger group of 900 that had arrived in Annapolis following their expulsion from Nova Scotia by British authorities – were soon being called on by Reverend John Ashton, the resident Catholic priest of Carroll Manor. Ashton visited Baltimore Town once a month to provide church services for the few Catholics living there. The Reverend and his congregation, consisting of some 40 members -  including a few of the Acadians – took for their place of worship one of the lower rooms of the Fottrell house; one of their first tasks consisted of “expelling the hogs which had habitually nested there.”(4)

From these squalid beginnings emerged Baltimore’s first Catholic Church. In 1770 the congregation began construction on St. Peter’s Church, at the corner of Saratoga and Charles Streets. Although the original building was torn down in 1841, a new church was built two years later that still stands at the corner of Hollins and Poppleton Street in West Baltimore. Edward Fottrell’s house, on the other hand,  had a much shorter life span. In 1780 the State of Maryland seized the residence and property, which was then in the possession of Fottrell’s heirs, divided up the land into six lots and sold them off at auction.

John Moale’s sketch of Baltimore Town provided the basis for a number of prints in the first half of the nineteenth century that proved to be very popular. Moale provided no identifications of the structures that he sketched out – the later reproductions have filled in many of the details left out by the amateur artist. Probably the most widely known as well as the most artistically rendered is an 1817 engraving by architect William Strickland. Some notable additions are the two ships visible in the harbor. The larger vessel is the “Phillip and Charles,” owned by William Rogers who also operated of one of the town’s two taverns. Docked on the left side of the harbor is the Sloop “Baltimore,” built in 1746 and owned by Captain Darby Lux, a two-time commissioner of Baltimore Town. The ship was the first Baltimore owned vessel to be sailed from the port. Lux’s house on Light Street is also identified in the print. The main thoroughfare, visible in the center of the engraving, is Calvert Street. Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16.

The first and fourth St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church.
(top) The first, built 1739, razed in 1786; Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16, (detail)
(bottom) The fourth, built in 1854, 233 N. Charles Street, June 2013.

The most prominent structure in Moales’ original sketch, although it appears unfinished, is St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church, Baltimore’s first church of any denomination. Completed in 1739, it was built atop Saratoga Street Hill, the highest point in town. By 1780, the building had become too small to accommodate its rapidly growing congregation, and a new church was built on another section of the large parcel of land bound by Lexington, Saratoga, Charles and St. Paul Streets, purchased by the church when the town was first established in 1729. The original church was put to use as a school until being demolished in 1786.

One feature of the early town that does not appear in either Moale’s sketch or the later reproductions was a wooden fence erected around the town in 1750. According to historian Thomas Scharf, the fence was built to protect the town from hostile tribes of Native Americans. Many sources have repeated this tale, although it appears the townsfolk had a far more mundane reason for erecting the fence that encircled the town “as completely as the walls enclosed a medieval fortress.”(5) It was instead devised as a barrier against the herds of swine, flocks of sheep, and gaggles of geese that roamed freely throughout the town. The hogs did serve some purpose, acting as an early sanitation department, as well as providing a source of food for the poorer members of the community. But these benefits were apparently soon outweighed by their penchant for destroying property, creating ruts in the roads, endangering children and causing general mayhem.

The fence however had a brief existence – residents soon began removing sections of it for firewood. One of the persons accused of pilfering timber was Thomas Chase, the rector of St. Paul’s Church. By November of 1752 most of the fence was gone. Whether John Moale intended to add the fence to his unfinished drawing or whether he sought to keep the image of the dilapidated enclosure from the historical record when he sat down to put pen to paper will probably never be known.

In 1796, Baltimore Town – which in 1773 had merged with Jones Town and Fell’s Point – incorporated to form the City of Baltimore. Only a handful of the buildings that existed prior to the merger of the three neighboring communities survived into the late nineteenth century. The last building visible in John Moale’s sketch to fall by the wayside was apparently Kaminsky’s inn, located at 106-110 Mercer Street, at the northwest corner of Mercer and Grant Streets. An 1885 Baltimore Sun article described the tavern as being:

“built in 1750 of wood, two stories and an attic, with dormer windows. The first story was plastered outside and the upper part weather-boarded. A lone flight of stairs from the outside led up to the second story. The building presented the appearance of an old-fashioned German hostelry. It was the grand hotel of the city. Washington, Lafayette and other revolutionary heroes stopped there.”(6)

Baltimore Town’s last remaining building finally met its demise in the early 1870s when it was razed to make way for three iron-front buildings at 101-105 East Redwood Street. These buildings were in turn destroyed some 30 years later when the Great Fire of 1904 swept through downtown Baltimore. A dozen years passed before another edifice, the Sun Life Insurance Company Building, was erected.(7)

In 2000, the site of one of Baltimore’s first two inns made a return to its roots when the Sun Life Building and its companion on the block – the former headquarters of the Merchant and Miners Transportation Company – were demolished to make way for a Residence Inn Marriott. While it lacks the charms of its predecessor, with laundry dangling from its windows (see photo below), it does make up for it in girth, rooming capacity, and general unattractiveness. (Damon Talbot)

Progression of a city block.
(Top left) Kaminsky’s Inn. Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16, (detail)
(Top right) Kaminsky’s Inn, ca 1875, MdHS, CC 2821. The Tavern was originally two stories; a third story was added at some point in the nineteenth century to adjust to alterations in the street level.
(Bottom right) Sun Life Insurance Building, 109 East Redwood Street, about to be demolished, ca 2000; the building next to it is the partially demolished former Headquarters of the Merchant and Miners Company.(photograph not from MdHS’s collection)
(Bottom left) Marriott Residence Inn, 17 Light Street, June 2013.

Footnotes:

(1) Scharf, J. Thomas, The Chronicles of Baltimore: Being a Complete History of “Baltimore Town” and Baltimore City (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1874), 48; Mayer, Brantz, Baltimore: Past and present with biographical sketches of its most prominent men (Baltimore: Richardson and Bennett: 1871)

(2) Scharf, Thomas J., History of Baltimore City and County (Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1971), 58.

(3) Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16.

(4) Scharf, J. Thomas, The Chronicles of Baltimore, 66.

(5) Stockett, Letitia, Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History (Baltimore: Grace Gore Norman, 1936), 45.

(6) “A Leaf from the Past,” The Baltimore Sun, December 5, 1885

(7) The Sun Life Insurance Company building was designed by Louis Levi, the first Jewish member of the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Sources and further reading:

Beirne, Francis F., St. Paul’s Parish, Baltimore: A Chronicle of the MotherChurch (Baltimore: Horn-Shafer Company, 1967)

Clark, Dennis Rankin, Baltimore, 1729-1829: The Genesis of a Community (Washington D.C., 1976)

Griffith, Thomas W., Annals of Baltimore (Baltimore: Printed by William Wooddy, 1824)

Gunts, Edward “Residents may rise at Redwood and Light,” The Baltimore Sun, November 29, 2004.

Gunts, Edward “Turning Point for Downtown,” The Baltimore Sun, August 13, 2000.

Hall, Clayton Colman, ed., Baltimore: Its History and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1912)

Hayward, Mary Ellen & Frank R. Shivers Jr., ed., The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History (Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 2004)

Jones, Carleton, Lost Baltimore: A Portfolio of Vanished Buildings (Baltimore: Maclay & Associates., 1982)

Kelly, Jacques, “Redwood Street preservation move grows”, The Baltimore Sun, September 30, 2000.

Kelly, Jacques, The Voice of this Calling: St. Paul’s Parish – Baltimore, Maryland, 1692-1992 (Baltimore: The Vestry of St. Paul’s Parish, 1993)

“A Leaf from the Past,” The Baltimore Sun, December 5, 1885

MarylandState Archives, Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series) John Moale

Mayer, Brantz, Baltimore: Past and present with biographical sketches of its most prominent men (Baltimore: Richardson and Bennett: 1871)

The Passano-O’Neill Files: Light Street (7-11); Mercer Street (106-110); Charles Street (231 North); Calvert Street (100-102 North)

Rice, Laura, Maryland History in Prints, 1743-1900 (Baltimore: The Press at the Maryland Historical Society, 2002)

Scharf, J. Thomas, The Chronicles of Baltimore: Being a Complete History of “Baltimore Town” and Baltimore City (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1874)

Scharf, J. Thomas, History of Baltimore City and County (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881)

Stockett, Letitia, Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History (Baltimore: Grace Gore Norman, 1936)

The Regent Theater, circa 1948, MdHS, SVF.

The theaters, night clubs, and restaurants that once made Pennsylvania Avenue Baltimore’s center for African-American entertainment  are today a receding memory. In the segregated Baltimore of the early to mid twentieth century, the Avenue was where African-Americans went to see the latest films, have a drink at one of the many nightclubs and bars, and hear the jazz of Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, and Cab Calloway, the comedy of Redd Fox and Slappy White, and the funk of James Brown. Most of the establishments were gone by the end of the 1970s, either occupied by new businesses, laying vacant, or demolished. A few soldiered on—the Sphinx Club, one of the last to go, closed its doors in 1992. The most famous venue on the Avenue, the Royal Theater, was one of the premier stops on the “chitlin’ circuit,” the chain of clubs and theaters running through the eastern and southern states featuring African-American entertainers. While the Royal may have been the best known theater on the Avenue, it wasn’t the largest—that designation would have to go to the Regent Theater.

The Regent Theater was from the start a family operation. On Jun 9, 1916, Louis Hornstein and his two sons, Simon and Isaac, opened the theater on the former site of a coal yard at 1629 Pennsylvania Avenue. Advertised as the “largest, coolest, best ventilated house in the city,” the theater was located in a one-story brick building designed by Baltimore architectural firm Sparklin & Childs. (1) For the next 50 years the Hornstein family owned and operated the Regent. The family later acquired the Lenox and the Diane theaters, also on Pennsylvania Avenue.

At the time of its opening, the Regent was the largest movie house in Baltimore, with a seating capacity of 500 and its own orchestra. The theater specialized in “high class-photo plays and Vaudeville.”(2) John W. Cooper, the first African-American ventriloquist on the largely white vaudeville circuit, was a bonus attraction on opening night. Billed as “the only colored ventriloquist in the world,” the “Black Napoleon of Ventriloquists,” and the “Polite Ventriloquist,” Cooper’s most famous routine, a barbershop skit, incorporated multiple dummies operated with the use of foot pedals and fishing line.

Auditorium, The Regent Theater, September 1948, Paul Henderson, MdHS, HEN.00.B1-033.

In 1920, the Hornsteins expanded the Regent’s auditorium with the purchase of lots south, extending the theater to 1619 Pennsylvania Avenue. The original building at 1629 was retained as the entrance. The theater now had a seating capacity of 2,250, with additional balcony seating.

Although the patrons of the establishments that lined Pennsylvania Avenue were predominantly African-American, the ownership of these businesses was almost entirely white. Within Baltimore’s African-American community, the Hornsteins were particularly well respected and the Regent was renowned for its “high class attractions and low prices.” Following the 1920 renovations, a reviewer for the Afro-American newspaper called the newly expanded theater a “legitimate playhouse where colored patrons would not be humiliated by the odious presence of … ’Mister James Crow.’”(3)

In 1925, Isaac Hornstein cancelled the planned exhibition of a series of films featuring heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, after the champ made disparaging remarks about African-American contenders for his title and “proposed to prevent any colored contender from having a ‘look see’ at the heavyweight diadem.” Hornstein told a reporter from the Afro that the Regent played “to colored patrons, and I would certainly be insulting them should I play a picture featuring a man having the sentiment as expressed by Dempsey in the press. I stand unalterably by my original refusal, and you may say for me that this picture or no other that in any way offends our patrons will ever be flashed from this screen.” Other theaters in the city soon followed the Regent’s example.(4)

The Hornsteins set high standards for their theater, and expected their patrons do the same. Louis Hornstein was known to send movie goers home to change their clothes if they were not suitably attired. They also kept up with the latest advancements in film technology. In 1928 the Regent made the transition from silent to sound film when it became the second movie house in Baltimore, and the only African-American theater, to be equipped with the new Vitaphone sound system. An article in the Afro-American enthused that the Regent was “the only local house open to race trade that has contracted for this last word in motion picture entertainment.”(5) In 1953 the theater was equipped with both 3-D and the recently invented Cinemascope.

While the more celebrated Royal Theater was often the first and only stop in Baltimore for many of the top African-American entertainers of the era, the Regent—although primarily a movie theater—attracted its share of live performers, including Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Sidney Poitier. Baltimore’s own Cab Calloway and Eubie Blake (along with his songwriting partner Noble Sissle) performed at the Regent. Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, gave a boxing exhibition at the theater.

Lobby, The Regent Theater, 1948, Paul Henderson, MdHS, HEN.00.B1-030.

In 1964, Henry Hornstein, the grandson of the original owner, leased the Regent and the family’s other theatrical properties to Jack Fruchtman, a Washington D.C. film exhibitor. Fruchtman’s company, JF Theatres, would eventually control some 50 movie theaters in Baltimore and the surrounding suburbs. If you name a theater in Baltimore, chances are that at one time or another, it was operated by Fruchtman. From now-departed theaters the Royal, the Avalon, the Mayfair, and the Rex to still operating movie houses like the Charles (formerly The Times) and the Rotunda Theater (which Fruchtman opened in 1967), Fruchtman left a large fingerprint on the city’s theatrical history.

Through the remainder of the 1960s and the early 1970s Fruchtman continued the operation of the Regent to apparent success. Film historian Robert Headley, in his 1974 book, Exit: A History of Movies in Baltimore, wrote that the Regent “was still going strong, and hopefully will be with us for many years to come.” But with the end of segregation in the 1960s, the era of Pennsylvania Avenue as Baltimore’s African-American entertainment mecca was coming to a close. Citywide, the neighborhood theater industry that had been entertaining film goers for over 60 years was dying a slow death, the result of white flight, escalating overhead costs, and the proliferation of suburban theaters. The unrest that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April of 1968 also kept many theater going patrons from the downtown area. According to Robert Headley, although actual physical damage to city theaters was minimal, the “psychic damage to the theater going public was terrible.” By the end of the 1970s, 114 Baltimore theaters had been closed down.(6)

Fruchtman began closing some of the least viable of his large fold of theaters earlier in the decade. In December of 1974 the Regent turned its lights on for the last time. At the time of its closing, the Regent was still the second largest movie theater in the city. For the remainder of the decade the property remained unoccupied, and in 1980 the theater was razed, joining the Royal, which had met the same fate three years earlier.

But the site at which one of Baltimore’s premier African-American theaters once stood remained tied to its entertainment past. In 1982, former Baltimore Colts wide receiver Glenn Doughty opened the Shake and Bake Family Fun Center on the former site of the Regent. Doughty—known in his playing days as “Shake and Bake,” based on his pregame mantra that the Colts were going to “shake up and cook” their opponents—purchased the vacant lot from the City for $1.00. With the backing of Mayor William Donald Shaefer, Doughty and his partners secured a nearly 5 million dollar loan from the city to build what the former Colt—who never reached the NFL championship game—called his “Super Bowl.”(7)

Shake & Bake Family Fun Center, 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue, former site of the Regent Theater, 2013. Photograph by Google.

When the center first opened in 1982, it was an immediate success. In the first year over 10,000 people a week were enjoying themselves at the 70,000 square foot complex which housed a 40 lane bowling alley, a 22,000 square foot roller rink, a video game room, and a sporting goods store. One patron said that the center “was a really big change for the community… it keeps people from hanging on the street corners.” The complex also housed an automated bank teller, an advertising firm, and two fast food restaurants. Almost entirely under African-American ownership—the Afro called it “the first major black owned and operated facility of its kind in the country”—the complex proved to be a model for other cities, with mayors visiting it for inspiration on inner city revitalization projects.(8)

Within two years though, the center was struggling financially, unable to attract people from outside the neighborhood.  In 1985, Doughty and his partners defaulted on their loan and the City took over the management of the center. Although the center has gone through tough times since then—in 1987, a former manager plead guilty to a charge that he stole nearly $80,000 while employed at the center—it is still in operation 30 years after first opening. The center continues to offer bowling, roller skating, and family fun. It also hosts practice sessions for the Harm City Homicides, Maryland’s first men’s Roller Derby team. The Shake and Bake Center was one of the earlier revitalization projects on Pennsylvania Avenue—more than three decades later, efforts to return the former cultural hub to at least a semblance of what it once was are still under way. (Damon Talbot)

Footnotes:

1. Advertisement, The Baltimore Afro-American, June 24, 1916. Sparklin & Childs were also responsible for other theaters in the city, including the Rialto Theater on North Avenue.

2. Headley Jr, Robert Kirk, Exit: A History of Movies in Baltimore, (University Park, Md, Robert Kirk Headley, Jr., 1974), p. 116.

3. “Regent’s Gradual Rise to Fame,” The Baltimore Afro-American, October 27, 1928; Headley, Jr, Robert Kirk, Motion Picture Exhibition in Baltimore: An Illustrated History and Directory of Theaters, 1895-2004 (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006), p. 380.

4.  “Regent Theater Owner Cancels Jack Dempsey Film,” The Baltimore Afro-American, February 7, 1925.

5.  “Regent Theater gets Vitaphone: Local Playhouse on of Few in the Country,” The Baltimore Afro-American, April 7, 1928.

6. Headley Jr, Robert Kirk, Exit: A History of Movies in Baltimore, (University Park, Md, Robert Kirk Headley, Jr., 1974), p. 116; Headley, Jr, Robert Kirk, Motion Picture Exhibition in Baltimore: An Illustrated History and Directory of Theaters, 1895-2004 (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006), p. 167.

7. Siegel, Eric, “Shake & Bake: Wide Receiver to entrepeneur, Doughty still meets challenges,” The Baltimore Sun, April 25, 1982.

8. Siegel, Eric, “Shake & Bake: Saturday Night street-corner rival,” The Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1982; Brown, Johanne, “Shake and Bake Grand Opening: The Realization of a Dream,” The Baltimore Afro-American, October 19, 1982; Gite, Lloyd, “Shaking and Baking in Baltimore,” Black Enterprise, February 1984.

Sources and Further Reading:

Advertisement, The Baltimore Afro-American, June 24, 1916

Cinematreasures.org

Headley Jr, Robert Kirk, Exit: A History of Movies in Baltimore, (University Park, Md, Robert Kirk Headley, Jr., 1974)

Headley, Jr, Robert Kirk, Motion Picture Exhibition in Baltimore: An Illustrated History and Directory of Theaters, 1895-2004 (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006).

Gite, Lloyd, “Shaking and Baking in Baltimore,” Black Enterprise, February 1984.

Kilduffs.com

“Other Houses Cancel Dempsey Films: Movie Theatres Follow Regent’s Lead,” The Baltimore Afro-American, February 21, 1925.

The Passano – O’Neill Files, Pennsylvania Avenue (1619-1629)

Peterson, Bernard L., Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.)

Rasmussen, Frederick, “Jack Fruchtman, Sr., 86, Theater Owner, The Baltimore Sun, July 3, 2001.

“Regent’s Gradual Rise to Fame,” The Baltimore Afro-American, October 27, 1928.

“Regent Theater gets Vitaphone: Local Playhouse on of Few in the Country,” The Baltimore Afro-American, April 7, 1928.

“Regent Theater Owner Cancels Jack Dempsey Film,” The Baltimore Afro-American, February 7, 1925.

Siegel, Eric, “Shake & Bake: Saturday Night street-corner rival,” The Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1982.

Siegel, Eric, “Shake & Bake: Wide Receiver to entrepeneur, Doughty still meets challenges,” The Baltimore Sun, April 25, 1982.

“3-D Cinemascope to Bring Crowds to Movies,” The Baltimore Afro-American, April 18, 1953.

Ventriloquistcentralblog.com

Sulzebacher House, ca 1865, MdHS, CC956.

West Baltimore was once a densely packed, vibrant neighborhood full of theaters, local businesses, and industry. Drive down many of the streets today and you’re likely to see a vacant lot or a boarded up row house on nearly every other block. But even an empty field has a history. The tiny, off-kilter house pictured to the left is one of the oldest houses in West Baltimore. Or at least it was circa 1865 when the photograph was taken. Like many of Baltimore’s historic structures it has been lost to time and the march of progress. It is now the site of a vacant lot. Built in the mid-1700s, the two-story wood frame house was located at 930 West Baltimore Street, two doors west of Amity Street. The property is known as the Sulzebacher house. The name is most likely a corruption of Sulzbach; according to the Baltimore city directories, a currier named Peter Sulzbach occupied the residence for a few years in the 1840s.

The house is of typical design for a mid-eighteenth century home in Baltimore. The gable roof may point to the construction of the home in the 1760s or 1770s; by then “gambrel roofs had fallen out of favor and most frame houses were a full two stories in height, with gable roof, with or without dormers.”* The building’s obvious tilt was characteristic of structures “located on streets built to match a since-altered street grade.”** Visible on the second floor is a fire insurance seal. Also called a fire mark, these iron, copper, or lead emblems indicated that a specific insurance firm paid a volunteer fire department to protect it – Baltimore’s first paid fire department was established in 1859, but the fire seals often remained left on the buildings. The Sulzebacher house survived for over 150 years, no mean feat for a wood frame house from that period. Sometime before 1911 the house was razed – the structure is not visible on the 1911 edition of the Sanborn fire insurance atlas – and replaced by a three-story barber shop.

Baltimore Street, 900 block west, looking east, 1920, Hughes Company, MdHS, MC6284. A sign for the New Aladdin Theater is visible in the center of the photograph. (Click to enlarge)

The house at 932 West Baltimore Street, the edge of which can be seen in the photograph, may have been even older. Built in the same period, it had a much larger frontage than its neighbor at 930. The original structure was razed just a few years prior to the Sulzebacher house to make way for a motion picture theater. Both 932 and 930 West Baltimore Street appear to have caught the eye of rival theater owners. At around the same time that James W. Bowers was pursuing the properties at 932, A. Freedman had similar designs on 930. Freedman apparently lost the contest, because the only theater that debuted was Bower’s Aladdin Theater, which opened its doors to the public near the end of 1909. Advertising itself as “West Baltimore’s finest motion picture house,” the Aladdin theater seated about 400 patrons.

Between 1910 and 1938 the theater changed both ownership and names a number of times. In 1917 J. Louis Rome purchased it and renamed it the New Aladdin. The following year it came under the control of C.E. Nolte and his partner, Baltimore-born movie mogul Frank Durkee, whose Durkee Enterprises owned or controlled a large number of the movies houses in Baltimore, including the Ritz, the Palace, the Arcade, and the Senator. In 1930 the theater became the New Queen. It was open for less than a year, perhaps closing from the effects of the Great Depression. Then from 1933 to 1938 it operated as the segregated Booker T. Theater. This was the last of the property’s run as a host for cinematic productions – in 1942 it was converted into a plant for the New Gold Bottling Company, a soft drink manufacturer.

Sun Spot Advertisement, 1949, Hughes Company, MdHS, PP30.254-49.

The New Gold Bottling Company was founded in 1925 by Greek immigrant Dionicios Karavedas. The company went on to produce Sun Spot, a popular orange flavored soft drink, whose advertisements boasted that it was made with real orange juice. During the 1950s and 1960s, the beverage, which retailed for a nickel, could be found in neighborhood stores and confectionaries throughout the city. The riots of 1968, which hit West Baltimore particularly hard, led to a decline in business for the soft drink manufacturer. In an odd change of direction, Dionicios’s son Nicholas, who took over the company after his father retired in 1960, began producing a sugar detecting beverage alongside his sugar enhancing ones – in the 1970s, he was involved with developing a product known as GTTS (Glucose tolerance testing solution) that detected the presence of gestational diabetes in pregnant women. Through a new company, Custom Laboratories, Inc., Karavedas went on to become the “the largest supplier of glucose testing solutions in the country.”***

Baltimore Street, 900 block west, looking east, 2013, Photograph by Google.

By the 1980s, the beverage companies were still producing their dissimilar drinks on West Baltimore Street. But the city had its own plans for the site. In the mid-1980s it began purchasing properties on both the 900 and 800 blocks of West Baltimore Street for a proposed redevelopment project.

By 1992 the Karavedas owned companies were the remaining holdouts. According to a Baltimore Sun article from that year, the beverage companies were “the last tenants on a block the city has been clearing for as-yet unspecified housing or commercial redevelopment use.”**** By 1998, they had relocated across the city to Highlandtown. Twenty years later the 900 block of West Baltimore street, now owned by the University of Maryland, still remains undeveloped, a field of grass surrounded by a mixture of boarded up row homes, storefronts, University of Maryland medical buildings, and vacant lots. (Damon Talbot)

900 block, West Baltimore Street, corner of Amity Street, 2013, Photograph by Google.

Footnotes:

 *Hayward, Mary Ellen & Frank R. Shivers Jr., ed., The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History (Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 2004), p. 9.

**The Passano Files, Baltimore Street (928, West)

***Kelly, Jacques, “Nicholas D. Karavedas, beverage producer, dies,” The Baltimore Sun, October 19, 2010. 

****”Boondoggle on Baltimore Street,” The Baltimore Sun, March 16, 1992. 

Sources and further reading:

”Boondoggle on Baltimore Street,” The Baltimore Sun, March 16, 1992. 

The Dielman-Hayward File, Karavadas, Dionicios

Hayward, Mary Ellen & Frank R. Shivers Jr., ed., The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History (Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 2004)

Headley, Jr, Robert Kirk, Exit: A History of the Movies in Baltimore (University Park, Md: Robert Kirk Headley, Jr., 1974)

Headley, Jr, Robert Kirk, Motion Picture Exhibition in Baltimore: An Illustrated History and Directory of Theaters, 1895-2004 (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006)

Jones, Carleton, Lost Baltimore: A Portfolio of Vanished Buildings (Baltimore: Maclay & Associates., 1982)

Kelly, Jacques, “Nicholas D. Karavedas, beverage producer, dies,” The Baltimore Sun, October 19, 2010.

Life Magazine, December 24, 1965

The Passano Files, Baltimore Street (928, 930-932, West)

http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/9958

http://www.fireserviceinfo.com/history.html

http://mises.org/journals/jls/3_3/3_3_6.pdf