The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins by Antero Pietila

Author:Antero Pietila [Pietila, Antero]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Segregated Sin

Before television, suburbanization, desegregation, and urban renewal killed them, several sin districts existed around the city. Pennsylvania Avenue was the unrivaled center of black carousing, part of the “Chitlin’ Circuit” touring itinerary that stretched from Harlem’s legendary Apollo all the way to roadhouses in Dixie. Pretty much everything was available: jazz, vaudeville, comedy, gambling, foxy ladies, and, still on a tiny scale, reefer and heroin.55 “Sporting tonight, sir?” was the come-on. This is how a regular described the scene: “Every night on the Avenue is Halloween, and Saturday is Mardi Gras.” Little Willie owned several clubs through front licensees and booked national talent. Visiting big names in jazz and rhythm and blues often also gigged at Carr’s Beach, his African American amusement park in Annapolis which catered to the whole region between Delaware and Washington and had legal one-arm bandits. Radio station WANN broadcast live from Carr’s Beach.56

In the segregated city, the Avenue vicinity was the black hub, location of professional offices, trailblazing entrepreneurs, and “colored” hotels where black ballplayers stayed because downtown hotels refused them. The bulk of businesses, however, was in white hands. Scattered white families also remained on side streets, but social interactions between the races were kept to a minimum because police raided private homes in search of “interracial whoopee houses.” Hundreds were rounded up in such raids. In 1930 two white couples were arrested in the Dolphin Street apartment of Mrs. Eva Moody, “a well known church worker” who was black, after complaints of interracial dancing.57

Overall, Jim Crow was much in evidence. Pennsylvania Avenue retailers served blacks, unlike the big downtown department stores, but many restaurants catered only to white shoppers and storeowners, dispensing takeout orders to blacks at the back door. Tellingly, the No. 1 black restaurant was not on the Avenue but on Division Street, near Provident Hospital and the elite Druid Hill Avenue residential areas of Marble Hill and Sugar Hill. It was Sess’s, famous for its fried chicken. “All of the stars from the Royal Theater used to go there for dinner—Pearl Bailey, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington. To say nothing of a heavy contingent of black doctors, lawyer and business types,” recalled one competitor.58

Pennsylvania Avenue59 attracted crowds of white shoppers because neighborhoods above North Avenue had not changed racially yet and contained the city’s largest concentration of aged Jews, working-class renters who had gravitated there from Old Town. Among white-owned businesses was a slaughterhouse founded in 1868 by a German immigrant, a great-great grandfather of longtime Maryland politician Charles “Dutch” Ruppersberger. The city-operated Lafayette Market was an Avenue chief attraction. It was a horn of plenty, surrounded by specialty vendors, such as Covington’s, which took telephone orders for chicken, ready for pickup. Nearby were discount department stores and a plethora of other businesses. Then in 1953, a monster blaze destroyed Lafayette Market in the wee hours. All of its 219 stalls were destroyed; some seventy-five nearby businesses were wiped out and dozens of residents displaced. Then the next year, nine replacement stalls were swept by fire.

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