Billie Holiday Plaza

Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.

-Wikipedia

Baltimore Uproar

Unveiled December 15, 1982, “Baltimore Uproar” is on permanent display at Upton/Avenue Market Metro Subway Station. The Venetian glass and ceramic mosaic measures 14’ x 46’ and features Baltimore-born jazz legend Billie Holiday and six instrumentalists. Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and worked briefly in Baltimore from 1935-1937 as an editorial cartoonist for the Afro-American before making New York his home. Bearden was the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his lifetime, and is recognized as one of the most creative and original African American visual artists of the twentieth century.

Royal Theatre

The Royal Theatre, which first opened in 1922 as the black-owned Douglass Theatre, was the most famous theater along West Baltimore City’s Pennsylvania Avenue, one of a circuit of five such theaters for black entertainment in big cities. Its sister theaters were the Apollo in Harlem, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theatre in Chicago, and the Earl Theater in Philadelphia. When racial separation was the normal condition in the United States, many other similar theatres owned by Negroes existed in various other cities and towns. Of late, those former nightspots have been called “Chitlin’ circuit” by some people. Ownerships of such establishments by Negroes has declined under the new policy called “racial integration.”

All of the biggest stars in black entertainment, including those in jazz and blues, performed at the Royal. Ethel Waters debuted there, as did Pearl Bailey, who sang in a chorus line. Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller worked as accompanists. Singer Louis Jordan, Duke Ellington, The Tympany Five, Etta James, Nat King Cole, The Platters, The Temptations, and The Supremes, as well as a 40-piece, all-female band touring with Count Basie called the Sweethearts of Rhythm, were all performers at the Royal. Baltimore City’s first talking motion picture was shown there: 1929’s Scar of Shame, featuring a black cast. It was here that Solomon Burke was crowned the King of Rock ‘n” Soul in November 1963.

As middle-class, white flight from Old West Baltimore continued during the 1960s and 1970s and accelerated after Pennsylvania Avenue was attacked during the civil rights riots, the entire community began a period of long decline. In 1971, the Royal Theater was demolished.

-Wikipedia