At the beginning of this project I thought Pennsylvania Avenue was a place that was dominated by owned and operated successful black businesses. The fact is that once the Jewish and white population moved on blacks did operate the clubs and stores on the Avenue; however, they only owned a small portion of the real estate. This proved to be a major problem when the riots of 1968 swept threw the city.
Another false claim that floats around our city is that Pennsylvania Ave was destroyed buy heroin and other popular drugs of the 70’s. This is only partially true because while heroin did contribute to the Avenues decline, it was a combination of the riots of 68, and the desegregating of downtown department stores that gave Pennsylvania Avenue its most devastating blow.
According Dr. Nix, “The Avenue’s stores and night spots were hurt not only by the loss of middle-class residents, but also by competition from newly-desegregated downtown stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues—and perhaps even more important, by American society’s changing consumer patterns, as television and car-oriented shopping malls took business away from downtown and local commercial districts alike. “Stores on Gay Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, West Baltimore Street, which had had a monopoly on the black dollar, they suffered,” pointed out longtime Pennsylvania Avenue merchant Herman Katkow in a recent oral history.
Baltimore’s shrinking industrial base meant that as opportunities increased for middle class blacks, they decreased for the poor. Edsall reported “large numbers of young men hanging around on the street corners every day. . . . The unemployment rate in the area is very high.” Crime worsened and illegal drugs became more and more prevalent. Unfortunately, urban renewal, one of the city’s primary tools for combating inner city “blight,” only served to add to the problem, as large-scale projects such as the proposed East-West expressway dislocated residents and businesses. The neighborhood’s population “declined between 20 per cent between 1950 and 1960,” Edsall noted, “and this downward trend is continuing as more and more clearance is being done for urban renewal.”
The combined impact of middle class flight, competition from new sources, increased crime, and displacement from urban renewal took a toll on Pennsylvania Avenue merchants throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As Edsall describes, “Stores began to close, theaters became movies and many of the bars began putting in juke boxes to replace live bands.” Though still a viable commercial center, by 1967, Pennsylvania Avenue was far from what it once had been. “Both the mood and the physical state of the avenue have changed,” Edsall observed. On the lower part of the strip, “About a third of the stores and many of the homes appear empty. Junk-covered vacant lots, broken windows and crumbling buildings combine to give the area an overwhelming aura of decay.” Conditions were better in the upper blocks: “Merchants on the hill have less of a sense of defeat than those on the bottom and although they complain, they still seem to think there is the possibility of improvement.” Nevertheless, one “hill” merchant, Joseph Rodman, told him that “the crime problem ‘gets worse and worse, the streets are dark and there are more and more dope pushers.”1
If the black business owners owned their real estate then maybe they could have survived the riots and combated the drug problem. The Jewish and white business owners were scared to reinvest into the neighborhood, because of the rise of violence and the rapid decline of residents, and with that said, the avenue was done. From that point on the Avenue continued decline.
Today the Avenue looks like a battle zone. Its streets are riddled with trash and drug paraphernalia. Zombie like dope fiends roam around hopeless and lost as the murder rate continues to climb. The generation of children growing up will never know what Pennsylvania Avenue once meant to the black community. Unless they read this blog!
1 Elizabeth Nix, Pivot in Perception: The Impact of the 1968 Riots on Three Baltimore Business Districts (Unpublished, 2009), 19.
