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