“Red-light district,” “tenderloin,” or “strip” never seemed to suit The Block. It’s been “The Block” for at least a century, since the 1920s, when young men, returning from serving in World War I, migrated to growing cities like Baltimore in search of jobs, homes, and yes, adult entertainment and sex.
Though Baltimore, like every other major port city in the U.S., had brothels in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were scattered around the city, and sex work was less geographically centralized. European immigrants settled in (de facto) segregated enclaves, often in neighborhoods surrounding the Port of Baltimore, where there were more options for cheap housing and paid work, but diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis, cholera, and smallpox were rampant and sometimes reached epidemic levels.
Still, the gender pay gap limited women to domestic work, teaching, and retail or food service industry jobs. Sex work quietly emerged as a second-tier alternative: the pay was better, but inherent social stigmas and adverse health effects deterred many women. Sexually transmitted infections only exacerbated public impressions of sex work as dirty, immoral, and sinful. As moral reformers rose to prominence nationwide during the “Progressive Era,” they increased pressures on law enforcement and politicians to regulate and limit sex work. The Baltimore Police Department raided brothels and buildings that rented to sex workers, arresting the women they suspected of prostitution and fining building owners to the point of destitution.
But there was a Gamblers’ Block — just north of The Block between the Fallsway and Lexington, Gay, and Fayette streets — that was known in the 19th century as “one of the best sporting towns in the country” at a time when gambling had yet to be banned. People came from up and down the East Coast to Gamblers’ Block, and almost inevitably went to Osceola (sometimes “Oceola”) Hall, where there was gambling, dancing, alcohol, and live music. Other halls, including Beard’s Policy Den, dotted the street, where “negroes, poor white people, and members of the social set used to mingle to put down their bets on the policy,” as Levi A. Thompson, superintendent of public buildings, told The Baltimore Sun in 1922. As gaming laws were established and enforced, many of these establishments were shut down or went out of business, and the entire block was demolished that year to build the War Memorial Building and Plaza.
The Block, which had gradually grown to encompass four blocks on E. Baltimore Street, became the new entertainment district in downtown Baltimore: music, arcade games, food, alcohol, vaudeville, dancing, sports betting, and gambling.
Around that same time, we can find early reports of “unusual police activity” in a “‘clean-up” of the “block district.” In 1955, the Baltimore Police Department arrested 162 people for a range of charges related to their presence at the Pepper Hill Club on the 200 block of N. Gay Street, less than a block from BPD headquarters, after discussions about “immoral conditions” at the club, notably “evidence of homosexuality,” which BPD Sergeant Hyman Goldstein suggested was a result of D.C. police “conducting a drive on homosexuals; apparently some of them are coming to Baltimore for their entertainment.” Ultimately, of the 162 arrested, only five were convicted, mostly for disorderly conduct.
The judge, in his ruling to dismiss the charges brought against the crowd, criticized police for entering a licensed club and making an unsanctioned mass arrest. The officers claimed that it was “so crowded and disorderly that it would have been impossible to single out individual violators,” and that their previous visits included warnings to the owners “about allowing ‘homosexuals’ to congregate there.”
Of course, most of this history applied only to white people. Just before passing the first-in-the-nation racial ordinances segregating housing, schools, and churches to white only and “colored persons” only in 1911, the city enacted codes that made it illegal for Black and white people to drink together, legally standardizing the de facto segregation that already persisted throughout the city
The west side of Baltimore was home to Pennsylvania Avenue — “The Avenue” — where theaters, taverns, clubs, and dance halls were (mostly) managed by and for Black people. In a Baltimore Afro-American article from August 1961, “Behind the Block’s ‘Cotton Curtain,’” journalist and writer George W. Collins noted that “there is another side to this neon jungle that has escaped public notice altogether — its segregation and discrimination.”
“If it seems contradictory that The Block, hangout for legions of the lost — beggars, thieves, vagabonds, prostitutes and pimps — is a hotbed of segregation, it is because The Block itself is contradictory,” Collins wrote. “For while a colored person is readily informed ‘this is a white place,’ ‘we don’t serve colored in here,’ or ‘you’ll have to take it out,’ in many cases those rendering these services are themselves non-white,’” as were many of the entertainers.
The Congress for Racial Equality, or CORE, chose Baltimore as its first “Target City” in 1961, embarking on five years of sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations targeting segregated restaurants, shops, and other businesses across Maryland to integrate. Finally, in 1966, as media attention increased and public pressures rose, several business owners on The Block came together and agreed to voluntarily integrate their establishments. “It was a unanimous decision of 22 owners of the Block that they would open their doors to everybody who conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen,” Samuel Goldstein, who owned the Villanova and was representing the other Block bar owners, told the Afro-American.
Off-stage and behind the scenes, the most lucrative endeavors were gambling, bookmaking, and prostitution. Decades of negative political attention; proposed legislation to demolish the whole area; and raids by BPD, the Maryland State Police, the FBI, IRS, and other law enforcement did little to stop the seedier activity.
Decades of negative political attention; proposed legislation to demolish the whole area; and raids by BPD, the Maryland State Police, the FBI, IRS, and other law enforcement did little to stop the seedier activity.
In 1970, after years of investigating, prosecuting, and convicting Block regulars, the FBI came to arrest Julius “The Lord” Salsbury — known to federal and local law enforcement who investigated him as Baltimore’s “kingpin of gambling” — who had already been convicted of running a gambling operation out of his club, the Oasis Cabaret, but was out on bail pending appeal. FBI agents waited for confirmation that the judge upheld his conviction, but when they went to his apartment to re-arrest him, they found it empty and Salsbury gone. He was never found. This incident inspired parts of Barry Levinson’s 1999 film “Liberty Heights” and Laura Lippman’s 2014 novel “After I’m Gone.” It wasn’t until 2021 that his daughter, who lives in Baltimore County, confirmed that he fled to Israel.
Blaze Starr, known to many as the “Queen of Burlesque,” came to Baltimore and started performing at the 2 O’Clock Club when she was 18. Years later, she bought the club, but in the meantime, she had an ongoing affair with Louisiana Governor Earl Long, nearly 40 years her senior, whom she met while performing at the Sho-Bar in New Orleans. The hot-cold romance lasted until his death in 1960 and was the subject of a 1989 film, “Blaze,” starring Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich. Similar to Salsbury, she led a quiet post-Block life: she retired to Eldersburg, where she made and sold jewelry.
Starr complained that pornography ended the glamorous period of The Block. It also gave rise to Sinclair Broadcast’s David Smith, who got his start selling pirated porn videos on The Block, as his former partner in the business told Rolling Stone.
A potent mix of bad luck, crime, corruption, and bad publicity has plagued The Block for years. Since the mid-1950s, attempts to raze the entire district in the name of urban renewal have chipped away at The Block; today, it is no longer four blocks but literally a single block. Mysterious deaths and questionable fires — including Samuel Goldstein’s murder and a case of arson that killed five — provided justification for restrictions. When State Police raided clubs on The Block in January 1994, it was an embarrassment for BPD, resulting in more negative press for police than The Block workers and owners.
Televisions, the advent of the internet, COVID-19 restrictions, and various attempts to “clean up” the area have not killed it. Right in the heart of the city, surrounded by City Hall, BPD headquarters, courthouses, and the Inner Harbor, The Block may be diminished, but it has, against all odds and obstacles, persisted.