Paving over history: A jazz great’s home is doomed
— Cab Calloway, “Minnie the Moocher”
Historic preservation is not a genteel affair. Especially in Baltimore, where early jazz great Cab Calloway — the fabled “Hi-De-Ho” man who died in 1994 — lived as an adolescent and teenager.
A few weeks ago, with the clock ticking on plans to demolish the Calloway home on Druid Hill Avenue, the late bandleader’s grandson stood in front of the uninhabitable building. For now, it endures a mile from where the Royal, one of the five storied theaters of the Harlem Renaissance, stood before it was razed in 1971.
Peter Cabell Brooks, 55, was giving a bit of history about “grandad’s” house, a boarded up ruin owned by the City of Baltimore and secured, like the rest of the block, behind a chain link fence.
“Cab got my grandmother Zelma pregnant when she was 16 and he was 20 and he left the city in shame,” Mr. Brooks said. “He’s doing gigs around the east coast and she says, ‘I’m not living this way,’ and comes back to Baltimore.’”
Their child was Camay Bertha Proctor, Brooks’ 93-year-old mother and one of Calloway’s five known children. She lives in Havre de Grace, Md.
Mr. Brooks, a professor of film and media, is quick with details and anecdotes from Calloway’s seven decades in show business. As he told of the inspirations for “Minnie the Moocher” and “Smokey Joe,” characters Calloway encountered in the neighborhood, a car pulled to the curb. Out jumped an enraged young man who ran to confront him.
“We told you to stop coming around here,” said the man, accusing Mr. Brooks — in colorful language — of deceit, exploitation, carpet-bagging and insulting the man’s mother, a community leader. “Why the [expletive] do you keep coming around here?”
Mr. Brooks threw up his hands, asking: “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to leave,” the man said and Mr. Brooks promptly did, later saying he didn’t want his presence to be the cause of someone getting hurt.
In a more diplomatic approach, the neighborhood’s position is clearly laid out on the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation’s website: They want the musician’s house torn down along with the other dozen or so on the west side of the blighted block. In 2016, the DHCDC began planning for a public park on the site to be named in honor of Calloway.
Mr. Brooks, despite his blood connection to the famous entertainer, is seen as a “bully” according to the statement for trying to upset those plans. By his own admission, he wasn’t aware of the house and its history until last year.
Pittsburgh connection
Some 90 years ago last week, Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club Orchestra played the Enright Theater at the corner of Penn and Beatty in East Liberty. Calloway was billed as “The Rudy Valee of Colored Land.” The Enright was bulldozed in the 1960s.
In 1933, Calloway performed at Duquesne Gardens — best remembered as Pittsburgh’s home for hockey before the advent of the Penguins — on North Craig Street in Oakland. Built in 1890 as a trolley barn, it was demolished in 1956.
Though Calloway’s performances skewed closer to vaudeville, his closest jazz contemporary from Pittsburgh would be Billy Eckstine, born William Clarence Eckstein in 1914.
In “Smoketown,” his indispensable book on 20th century Black culture in Pittsburgh, author Mark Whitaker relates that Eckstine’s father Clarence was a driver for Harry C. Milholland, president of the Pittsburgh Press. A moonlighting job, the extra money allowed Eckstein to buy a two-story home at 5913 Bryant Street in Highland Park.
The house still stands and since 1994, a year after Eckstine’s death in his hometown at 78, has been marked with a state historical plaque. It commemorates the famed vocalist’s influence on jazz in the 1940s, his mentorship of young musicians and 11 gold records. The last line reads, “He grew up in this house.”
More grand and less fortunate is the National Negro Opera House, once the pride of impresario and educator Mary Cardwell Dawson (1894-1962) at 7101 Apple Street in Homewood. From 1941 to 1962, it housed the nation’s first Black opera company. It became a Pittsburgh Historic Landmark in 1994 and for years has suffered blight, break-ins and scavengers.
Among the thefts at the property include the historical marker.
Paving over history
Progress is the assassin of the past. Ostensibly well-intentioned urban renewal during the 1960s Civil Rights era, when local governments could not resist the lure of Great Society dollars, paved over Black history in every major city in the United States. Here and there, a few sites have survived.
The August Wilson House on Bedford Avenue had angels — smart ones — standing between it and the wrecking ball after the great playwright’s
death in 2005. In Baltimore, the Babe Ruth Birthplace and a tiny house where Edgar Allan Poe lived (two miles south of the Calloway house) were similarly spared.
Bricks and mortar crumble (cities often bypass red tape by practicing demolition through neglect) but the books, movies and music remain, along with stories both true and stretched.
Did ownership of the Steelers change hands during a card game in the basement of the Apple Street opera house when it was owned by numbers king William “Woogie” Harris? It did not.
Veteran vocalist Bettye LaVette, scheduled to release an album of classics by female greats including Billie Holiday and Nina Simone this month, toured with Cab Calloway in the 1970s musical, “Bubbling Brown Sugar.”
Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the show also features the music of Duquesne native Earl “Fatha” Hines, who grew up high upon Grant Street. In his youth, Hines was encouraged by Baltimore-born pianist Eubie Blake [1887-1983], the ragtime great whose childhood home on Forrest Street also is gone.
“I got married in Louisville while we were doing [‘Brown Sugar’] and Cab gave me away between shows,” said LaVette. “The dancers all put on tutus and stood on their toes while Cab walked me down the aisle.”
There will be no walking down steps, hallways or aisles at the Calloway house on Druid Hill Avenue. On Aug. 2, Mr. Brooks received a decision from the City of Baltimore on his appeal to save the building. Denied.