My big interview with Mr. Ike Dixon founder of “Ike Dixon’s Comedy Club” fell through this week; however we may be on schedule for next week so lets keep our fingers crossed. While waiting for Mr. Dixon’s perspective I decided to pull up some info on the first settlers of Pennsylvania Avenue. Prior to starting my research I knew the first people who migrated to and established Pennsylvania were German, Jewish, and Italian residents and business owners. It was a place where residents could buy, sell, and trade goods.
City Paper published a brilliant article on the birth of the Pennsylvania Avenue and what it was like for early settlers (before it was an African American neighborhood). Below is an exert on the Avenue’s first residents.
“But African-Americans weren’t the first residents of Pennsylvania Avenue. “Other ethnic groups populated the avenue before blacks did,” says Alvin K. Brunson, director of exhibits and programs for the Center for Cultural Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educational and cultural enrichment located at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Wilson Street. He says that before African-Americans moved in Pennsylvania Avenue was populated by Jews, Italians, Germans, and other European immigrants, both as residents and business owners.
“It was definitely a retail district before African-Americans moved in,” Brunson says. The neighborhood was largely Jewish and Pennsylvania Avenue was lined with businesses where “goods and services could be bought and sold,” he adds. “And the Lafayette Market opened in 1871 and was driving much of this retail business.”
Of course, the history of the Avenue—and its black population—goes back further than that.
“Pennsylvania Avenue officially appears on Baltimore maps back in 1818,” Brunson says, first called the Wagon Road in the 18th century, then Hookstown Road, then Pennsylvania Road, as merchants and others traveled and traded up and down the thoroughfare between Baltimore and Southern Pennsylvania throughout the 1700s and 1800s. (The street, officially named Pennsylvania Avenue in 1818, still leads to its namesake state, via Reisterstown Road.) Some remnants of these early European residents remain there today: Brunson references the Etting Cemetary, at Pennsylvania and North avenues. It’s the oldest Jewish cemetery in Baltimore and dates from 1799, with the last burial taking place in 1881.
Meanwhile, Brunson says, 1799 also marked the arrival of the first group of black slaves from Haiti, who settled near the first block of Pennsylvania Avenue at Franklin Street, Brunson believes, to help build the St. Mary’s Seminary as slave labor. (St. Mary’s Seminary was located at 600 N. Paca St. before moving to Roland Avenue, where it resides today.) Soon after the Civil War ended in 1865, many ex-slaves and blacks who gained their freedom before the Civil War moved to Baltimore. As the black population of the Pennsylvania Avenue area increased, so did the number of churches (such as Union Baptist, Bethel A.M.E., and Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist), schools, hotels, and other businesses catering to blacks, which in turn also drew more residents and visitors. There were also a number of theaters, most owned by whites. “Theater owners saw the influx of blacks into this area as a means by which to make money,” Brunson says.
In fact, while African-Americans increasingly dominated almost all aspects of everyday life on Pennsylvania Avenue as the 20th century dawned, they did not dominate its commerce. Although there were always what Brunson categorizes as “a handful” of black-owned businesses on the Avenue—including the Smith Punch Base Coffee and Tea Co., which moved into the 1400 block in 1908, and the Cortez Peters Business School, which opened in the 1200 block in 1935—“from the 1920s to the 1950s, the businesses were predominantly owned by Jews,” he says. More black-owned businesses sprouted on the Avenue in the ’60s, Brunson says, but adds that “sometimes people paint a picture of Pennsylvania Avenue as a haven for black businesses, and that’s not true.””[1]
This article was a gift and a curse for me. I say this because it’s a valuable resource and full of useful info. The flip side is that City Paper basically did all of the work for me, so I now need to go above and beyond to find more information. But most importantly I found some good primary sources throughout the article that I could use as my projects builds.
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