Picture Pennsylvania Avenue decades ago, alive with clubs and theaters built by African American Baltimoreans who made this corridor their own. Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore was, from the 1920s through the 1960s, the equivalent of Harlem's 125th Street or Chicago's State Street — a place where Black Baltimoreans built a parallel city of clubs, theaters, restaurants, and businesses in the face of rigid segregation that confined them to this corridor while keeping them out of the rest of the city. The Royal Theatre, at 1329 Pennsylvania Avenue, was the Baltimore stop on the Chitlin Circuit, the touring network of Black entertainment venues that gave work to the great jazz and blues musicians of the era.
Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, probably at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and grew up in the blocks near here. She began singing in Baltimore clubs as a teenager and within a decade had become the most celebrated jazz vocalist in the world, her voice bending time and melody in ways that no one before her had imagined. The statue erected in her honor stands not far from where she grew up.
Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, and Little Richard all performed on this avenue. The desegregation of Baltimore entertainment venues in the 1960s paradoxically contributed to the decline of Pennsylvania Avenue, as Black audiences no longer needed to confine their patronage to this corridor.