Pennsylvania Avenue
Heritage Trail

Pennsylvania Avenue Heritage Trail takes you through Baltimore's premier historic African American neighborhood. Here you will meet civil rights leaders, artists and musicians, visit historic African American churches, and world renowned entertainment district. Along the Trail, you'll find colorful and informative story signs and site markers that introduce you to Baltimore African Americans that helped build the city, gain civil rights, and change the face of American music, art, literature, and politics.

Walk it, drive it, talk it, explore...more

Entertainment
Pennsylvania Avenue’s Jewels

Royal Theatre, ca. 1949

Between World War I and II, Old West Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue came of age as an entertainment district and a “must play” venue for known and aspiring African American stars. It was a lively stretch of performance venues, department stores and specialty shops crowded with Baltimoreans and out-of-town shoppers. Parades were numerous with marching bands moving ahead of Elks and Masons. Thousands — both black and white — cheered them on along the way. At night the Avenue’s clubs and cabarets pulsated from the sound of jazz, bee bop, and blues, as long lines of patrons waited to enter packed houses beneath brightly lit marquees. Theatres, taverns, dancehalls, and brothels were wedged between pawn shops and second-hand stores at the southern end of the Avenue...more

Churches
Safe Havens, Community Anchors

St. Peter Claver

Since the 18th century, African American churches have nurtured the soul while feeding, clothing and housing the poor; fighting for civil rights; supporting business initiatives and job placement; and providing leisure and social activities. They are numerous, both large and small, and community cornerstones.

Churches serve as more than places of worship in Baltimore’s black communities. They serve as places of empowerment and incubators for organizing and planning. Early on churches served as safe ports for freemen and slaves “longing to breathe free.” They provided the spiritual foundations for upward mobility and liberation...more

Civil Rights
Old West Baltimore Becomes a Fountain

The Old West Baltimore community became the center for the local and national Civil Rights Movements, often meeting in churches. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey visited churches here. Dr. Harvey Johnson founded the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty in 1886 “to use all legal means within our power to procure and maintain our rights as citizens”...more

Community Creation
By and for African Americans

Biddle Street - corner of Read Street, ca. 1940

In 1820, Baltimore’s African American community was the largest in the nation. By the time the Civil War started in 1861, 26,000 free blacks and approximately 2,000 slaves lived within the city’s borders. Although a slave state, Maryland accounted for one of every five free blacks in America.

The numbers alone, however, cannot adequately tell the story of the creation of Baltimore’s African American community. By 1870 houses extended to McMechen Street; by 1890 residential development stretched to Bloom Street. By the 1900s, nine blocks along what was considered “the bottom” (a mixed-raced neighborhood developed before the Civil War) became a residential hub for African Americans in Old West Baltimore...more