Photo credit:
Eli Pousson,
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Arch Social Club
Inventory No.:
B-4482
Other Name(s):
Schanze Theatre; Morgan Theatre/Morgan Hall; Wilson's Restaurant
Date Listed:
2/6/2025
Location:
2426 Pennsylvania Avenue (MD 26), Baltimore, Baltimore City
Category:
Building
Period/Date of Construction:
1946-1976
Architect/Builder:
Paul Emmart
Boundary Description:
The property consists of two Baltimore City tax parcels: 1. Ward 15, Section 13, Block 0294, Lot 014, with a premise address of 2426 Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217 (Property with theater building). 2. Ward 15, Section 13, Block 0294, Lot 089, with a premise address of 2425 N. Stockton Street, Baltimore, MD 21217 (property with one-story kitchen addition) .
Related Multiple Property Record:
Civil Rights in Baltimore, Maryland, 1831-1976
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Description:
The former Schanze Theatre, now the Arch Social Club, was constructed in 1912 of brick and stucco in an elaborate Beaux-Arts style. The rectangular plan building on the southwest side of Pennsylvania Avenue, just south of North Avenue in West Baltimore, is two stories high with a basement level. It features an ornate facade involving a denticulated pediment and relief sculptures of the muses Melpomene and Thalia. The ground floor interior was substantially modified around 1955 when the building was converted from a theater to a banquet hall for Wilson's Restaurant, a building once located to the north. New wood cladding was installed over the original facade shortly after the 1968 uprising following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This cladding altered the appearance of the ground level. Since the Arch Social Club acquired the building in 1973, most interior alterations have been minor, including painting and redecorating. The building's facade was restored in 2014 when the 1960s storefront was removed. The ground floor was rehabilitated with a new storefront. The building maintains sufficient integrity along its exterior and second-floor interior space to communicate its history and significance for the neighborhood's African American community.
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Significance:
Since first erected in 1912, the Arch Social Club building, originally the Schanze Theatre, has been shaped by patterns of racial segregation in West Baltimore. Black patrons were prohibited from the theater until the early 1940s, when the racial demographics of the surrounding neighborhood changed from majority white to predominantly African American, and theater operators began directly seeking Black patrons. By 1946, the second floor of the building, known as Morgan Hall, was used for lectures on civic issues, parties by Black social clubs, and hosted an interracial theatrical performance troupe called the Greenwich Theater Players. When the Wilson family acquired the property in the mid-1950s to expand Wilson's Restaurant, which served whites only, the building, which had been turned into a banquet hall, became the site of demonstrations by activists seeking equality in public accommodations, particularly by the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By 1959, the restaurant was open to all patrons; that year, famed baseball player Jackie Robinson was a guest at the banquet hall. And by the early 1970s, the Arch Social Club, a Black fraternal organization founded in 1905, occupied the site, having been displaced from its former clubhouse by an urban renewal project. The building is significant as the sole surviving clubhouse for the Arch Social Club, a historically significant African American male social group, as well as for its association with the civil rights movement and the history of racial segregation and discrimination experienced by African Americans in Baltimore City.
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