by Tom Warner (Accelerated Decrepitude, 2/6/2012)

14Karat Cabaret director Laure Drogoul (photo by Kirsten Beckerman)

“I was digging through the piles of yellowing newspaper clippings I’ve accumulated over the years and came across this City Paper article by Associate Editor Sono Motoyama (who loved any story involving sex) from July 23, 1993. It described a vice squad bust of Laure Drogoul’s 14Karat Cabaret during an evening of performance art — an event I attended. As I recall, the performer who caused all the fuss was Jeffrey Clagett (aka “Hermaphrodite”), a local hairdresser and Cher impersonator who was a member of that evening’s Haus of Frau ensemble; he distributed the fliers advertising “Free Blow Jobs” that caught the eye of the city vice squad, who should have known better because there’s no such thing as a free munch.” — Tom Warner

14Karat Cabaret Director Locked Up on Permit Violations
by Sono Motoyama (City Paper, July 23, 1993)

Responding to a flier announcing a “Biggest Dick Contest” and “Free Blow Jobs” at the 14Karat Cabaret, plain-clothes officers from the central district vice unit of the Baltimore City police department and a representative from the city’s zoning enforcement agency descended on 14Karat Cabaret late Saturday evening, July 17, the cabaret’s final performance for the season.

Finding no violations of the type implied by the flier at the cabaret, part of Maryland Art Place (MAP), a nonprofit arts organization and gallery on West Saratoga Street, police arrested cabaret director Laure Drogoul for permit violations.

According to sector supervisor Sergeant John Baker, who was at the scene, Drogoul was charged with “operating a business without a permit and selling alcohol without a license.” Licenses are required by the city and state for venues offering live entertainment and serving alcohol.

After being handcuffed and taken to the central district lockup in a paddy wagon, Drogoul spent about 13 hours locked up downtown. She was released Sunday on her own recognizance. Reached Monday afternoon, Drogoul said that she “forgot” to get a temporary liquor license as, she maintains, she has done during every cabaret performance except Saturday’s.

Jack Rasmussen, director of MAP, speaking of the cabaret’s lack of a permit for live entertainment, said, “We though we had all the permits we needed…We always thought we had all the permits we needed…We always thought of ourselves as an art gallery with performance art.”

“You may call it art. They may call it entertainment,” interjected Drogoul.

“We’ve been here for eleven years,” noted Rasmussen, “and the cabaret’s been here for four years, and it’s never come up before. You have to be an attorney to figure it out.

The cabaret, which was characterized by one central district lieutenant as “primarily a homosexual or gay club,” featured as emcees on Saturday night the Headhuntresses XXXtraordinaire, a duo who wore dildoes strung around their waists. Also on the bill were the experimental music group the Recordings, saxophonists John Eaton and Nancy Sexten, and Haus of Frau, a drag-queen performance group. It was the Haus of Frau who printed and distributed the fliers announcing the fictitious “Biggest Dick Contest” and “Free Blow Jobs.”

Continue reading “Baltimore Vice: The Night They Raided the 14Karat Cabaret” at Tom Warner’s “Accelerated Decrepitude.”

By Brennen Jensen (Baltimore City Paper, 11/8/2000)

“Aristocratic, historic Baltimore is the slumming-ground for thousands of escaping Washingtonians.”

Such a statement could have been written yesterday, given the number of D.C.-area residents who regularly hammer up Interstate 95 for a ball game or a night of drunken debauchery on our fair streets. But there’s nothing new under the sun: The above was written 49 years ago by journalists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two New York Daily Mirror scribes who churned out a series of sensationalized burg-bashing best sellers in the early ’50s exposing the seedy underbelly of the Eisenhower era. Their trash-talking tomes include New York Confidential, Chicago Confidential, and USA Confidential. (The pair could find filth anywhere; the national book has a chapter titled “Bloody Kansas–silos and sex!”) It’s likely the rakish reporters’ blistering books overturned rocks on a good bit of honest-to-God skullduggery, graft, and political corruption, but the overheated prose is so clearly designed to titillate milquetoast Middle America that much of their muckraking is hard to take seriously.

Today their works are largely campy hoots that evoke a hard-boiled world of clip joints, B-girls, and smoke-choked gambling dens–think low-budget film noir. Alas, modern readers will also find the pair’s potboilers to be xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and homophobic. (There’s a heady whiff of McCarthy-esque Red paranoia in the pages as well.) I guess we’re lucky this duo of sleaze jockeys never penned a full-length “Baltimore, Confidential,” but a 19-page chapter bearing that name is tucked at the end of 1951′s Washington Confidential, a dog-eared copy of which I recently obtained from a friend.

“Baltimore is perhaps the perfect example of a Mafia-controlled city in action,” Lait and Mortimer assert early on in their Mobtown dismemberment. After discussing the dubious nature of the city’s political machinery–dropping the names of Bill “Boss” Curran, state Sen. Herbert O’Conor, Gov. Theodore McKeldin, and Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro–they get even nastier. “Baltimore is overrun with rubes,” they write. It’s a “yokel cosmopolis” where “guttered drunks and streetwalkers . . . are a common sight on every corner.”

Naturally this pair of smut seekers wind their way to the Block, the strip-joint-lined section of East Baltimore Street they bill as “one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world.” They bounce from basement dive to shoddy strip club to no-tell nightclub, encountering everything from droopy-bosomed “elderly relics” to an 18-year-old who, for a dollar tip, “let you play around and never slap your hands.” They also chuckle at the proliferation of store signs proclaiming the availability of “sanitary rubber goods” or “sanitubes.” (Condoms, it seems, weren’t available at the local Safeway back in ’51.) And they spy–shock! horror!–”playing cards with naked females on the cover.”

The gumshoe reporters eventually explore the “better region” along North Charles Street, then home of the town’s largest legit nightclubs–the original Club Charles (Preston and Charles streets) and the Chanticleer (now the Hippo, at Charles and Eager streets). But even here the intrepid pair finds “private cheating flats,” where “chumps are steered . . . for girls, booze, and stud poker.” Greenmount Avenue is tantamount to the Las Vegas strip, home to gambling dens from midtown through Waverly. While the writers comments regarding African-Americans are rarely charitable, after exploring Baltimore’s black nightlife they conclude that “some of the cleanest and best nightclubs in town are the black-and-tan resorts in the Pennsylvania Avenue district.”

“Provincial,” “a backwash,” “dirty,” “smoke-grimed”–such are the ways the notebook-wielding New Yorkers described our town. Perhaps the kindest passage in this curt civic assault comes on the final page: “In thousands of uniform flat-front red brick homes with the balustradless white stoops, unique to Baltimore, live good, solid people, white and Negro.” But Mortimer and Lait just can’t leave well enough alone, concluding “Baltimore Confidential” thusly:

“Most citizens are openly on the side of the lawbreakers, [and] the concepts of liberty and non-interference play into the hands of the hoodlums and harpies. At this writing any and all forms of vice are tolerated and protected. There is a price for everything, and it’s not much. In fact it costs only $500 to jump to the top of police promotions list.”

By the International Team of Comics Historians

(1.) THE ALARM.
“On Thursday night, after he had retired, Mr. Lincoln was aroused, and informed that a stranger desired to see him on a matter of life and death. A conversation elicited the fact that an organized body of men had determined that Mr. Lincoln should never leave the City of Baltimore alive. Statesmen laid the plan, Bankers endorsed it, and Adventurers were to carry it into effect.”

(2.) THE COUNCIL.
“Mr. Lincoln did not want to yield, and his friends cried with indignation. But they insisted, and he left.”

(3.) THE SPECIAL TRAIN.
“He wore a Scotch plaid Cap and a very long Military Cloak, so that he was entirely unrecognizable.

(4.) THE OLD COMPLAINT.
“Mr. Lincoln, accompanied by Mr. Seward, paid his respects to President Buchanan, spending a few minutes in general conversation.

Evading Baltimore assassins earned vitriol, and the chance to fight another day.

By Geoff Brown (U.S.News & World Report, 2/26/2009)

When president-elect Barack Obama walked down the steps of Baltimore’s War Memorial on Jan. 17, 2009, to deliver a speech to a crowd of tens of thousands of cheering supporters, he achieved a remarkable feat that another president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had been unable to manage 148 years earlier: Obama could show his face in Baltimore.

What kept the newly-elected Lincoln from speaking during his February 1861 trip to the city was hatred and fear: hatred of his political party (he was the first GOP president), his Northern leanings, and his antislavery views, and fear that he would be assassinated before he had even taken office.

Lincoln had become an instantly divisive figure following his election in 1860; his opinion ratings in the Southern states probably hovered between “I hope he gets tuberculosis” and “I’ll kill him myself.” As vicious as the criticism of the executive office has been for the past decade, the words of today’s pundits and talking heads are mewls compared to the calls for rebellion, secession, and even assassination that greeted the new President Lincoln.

Such was the state of the union that Lincoln traveled, by train, in February 1861, heading to Washington, D.C., for his March 4 inauguration (the Civil War would begin one month later, on April 12). Still, in the North, Lincoln had plenty of fans. Huge crowds had greeted the president-elect’s train in places like Buffalo, the excited throng even injuring a member of Lincoln’s meager corps of bodyguards. (There was no Secret Service at the time: Why would such a thing be needed? No one had ever attempted to kill an American president.)

Yet as the Lincoln Special wound its way toward Baltimore, concerns about safety began to grow, based in part on the city’s Southern sympathies and the vagaries of the U.S. railway system of the mid-19th century. Baltimore, one of the nation’s largest cities at the time, was utterly unreceptive to the incoming president (neither the mayor nor Maryland’s governor ever extended an invitation to Lincoln to visit the city). Talk of Lincoln “not leaving Baltimore alive” was not uncommon.

Continue reading “Abraham Lincoln Inauguration Not Assured Until He Gave Baltimore Assassins the Slip” at U.S. News & World Report.

The Skeptics new “Ghost of Abraham Lincoln” music video!

The Skeptics are:

• Andrew McCutcheon (lead vocals and guitar)
• Dennis Crolley (bass, keyboards, backing vocals
• Stephen Blickenstaff (drums and backing vocals)

The Skeptics performing at Baltimore, Maryland’s Trendont Street Stop in April of 1985.

On World Toilet Day the author asks: “How do you manage to enjoy a city if you’re constantly worrying about “holding it”?”

by Art Cohen (Baltimore Brew, 11/19/2010)

Vintage “comfort station” (ie public restroom) converted to a community visitors’ center by Historic Federal Hill Main Street. Photo by: Art Cohen, Baltimorebrew.com

“For some reason which is never clear to any foreigner, American cities tend to ignore one of the simple facts of nature.”

The need to urinate is what was being referenced delicately in this article about toilet availability, published in The Baltimore Evening Sun on January 2, 1941, on the eve of the arrival of 50,000 troops on their way to fight in World War II.

To accommodate the full bladders of an earlier wave of soldiers, during World War I, Baltimore churches had opened their toilet facilities to members of the public needing restrooms. In 1942, the City’s Advisory Engineers recommended that the City Plan Commission add seven additional public toilets (referred to as “comfort stations”) to the nine that had been constructed in or near Baltimore markets between 1907 and 1929.

Continue reading “Whatever Happened To Public Toilets?” at Baltimore Brew.

Ex-Stripper’s Days Are Now Quiet Ones

By Rafael Alvarez (The Baltimore Sun, 2/2/1993)

It isn’t right for Jean Honus to be all alone on Barney Street.

The house is quiet; hours are long.

And there’s no action.

Not like the days when men gave her diamond watches just because they liked the way she moved.

When strangers by the hundreds whooped and hollered and whistled as she sashayed her knockout figure across a stage.

Back when Jean Honus did the striptease on Baltimore’s Block in the glory days of burlesque.

The theaters and musicians, the bookies, the barkers, the wise guys, the prizefighters and the straight men, all gone.

At age 74, the woman born to a coal-mining family in Shenandoah, Pa., accepts that time has reduced the art of burlesque to stark nudity and robot music.

But it’s not right, she says, that she outlived almost all of her friends from her burlesque days.

“I’m very lonely,” says Miss Honus, cooking up a big pot of rigatoni and hot sausage, grateful for the chance to entertain a new visitor to her South Baltimore rowhouse, eager to fill a fresh ear with her stories. “I go out every day now and sit with friends, but people don’t want to hear too much of your troubles. You try to hide from loneliness, but it’s so hard. I don’t know what to do with myself so I just get up and get out of here. I go down to the market even if I don’t have to buy anything.”

Fast living and hard liquor, she says, killed most of her colleagues years ago.

“I have no friends because they drank themselves to death,” she says, tears coming to her eyes. “Drink ruined my girlfriends, girls that should be here today with me. I took care of myself and I’m here. They drank morning, noon and night — they thought they were having fun, but they weren’t happy. Sometimes I’d take two days off from work just not to drink, to get some sleep and take care of myself. I had a lot of fun, but it all just came and went.”

Continue reading “Former Burlesque Dancer Reminisces” at The Baltimore Sun.

(Note: Jean Honus passed away on April 18th, 1998)

Tommy Carson (left) singing with Dale Coleman (right)

Dale Coleman Sr., Age 62
The 1960s and 1970s rock guitarist devised a concert finale in which he would set his arms on fire.

By Jacques Kelly (Baltimore Sun, 2/14/2007)

Dale Coleman Sr., a 1960s and 1970s rock guitarist who created an act where he set his arms on fire, died Friday of Crohn’s disease at Bon Secours Hospital. The Loch Raven Village resident was 62.

“He was one of the greatest guitar players I was ever associated with,” said band leader Tom Stauch of Abingdon, better known as Tommy Vann. “He patterned himself after Jimi Hendrix, but Dale was always distinct and unique. Long before Hendrix, he was doing wild things with the guitar.”

Born in Baltimore and raised in Timonium, Mr. Coleman began playing music while attending Dulaney High School. He also studied music composition for two years at the Peabody Conservatory.

Mr. Coleman began appearing at high school fraternity dances at the old Gwynn Oak’s Park Dixie Ballroom.

“Every night seemed to end in a fight, and the mirrors at one side of the building got broken,” said a brother, Chris Coleman of Sparks.

The rock bands Mr. Coleman joined performed at Baltimore County nightspots, including Christopher’s in Timonium, Satyr House and Club Venus, both on Joppa Road, and Latin Casino in Essex. Friends said he established a following as he played.

“He had a bigger-than-life personality. He was a Hollywood kind of person who never made it to Hollywood,” said Joe Baranoski, who heard him play nearly 35 years ago. “His music was incredible — he played the music of the times — Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad — and he added his own flair to it.”

Mr. Coleman bought a Gibson Firebird guitar and could play it with his teeth — or behind his back.

“I saw him sleep with that guitar,” said Tom Carson, a friend who sang with The Fugitives. “He was a wild man, an innovator, who played with long, bony fingers. He was one of a kind, a master of the guitar.”

Mr. Coleman played with The Fugitives, Charades, Tommy Vann and the Professionals, and Expressway, which traveled with the Edgar Winter Group and was a warm-up act for Aerosmith concerts. His guitar playing is heard on the 1968 Tommy Vann recording of Soul Sister Annie on Capital Records.

“I’m just one of those people that has to move around when I’m playing,” he told an Evening Sun reporter in 1974 when describing his stage personality.

As music changed in the 1970s, Mr. Coleman added electronic instrumentation to his performances, including the wah-wah pedal. He also sang and played harmonica in a style reminiscent of Bob Dylan.

Mr. Coleman added pyrotechnics, consulting with a chemist and a friend who taught high school science. They created a combustible mixture of mutton tallow and petroleum distillate.

“When I’m going that route, I soak my arms in alum and cold cream for a couple hours,” Mr. Coleman said in the 1974 interview, adding that he had had only a minor burn in 50 finales to his act — when he would set his arms on fire as he played.

Mr. Coleman was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in 1979. He later became disabled and retired from music.

He worked in the Charles Street jewelry shop owned by his father, Nelson Coleman Sr., in the basement of the Woman’s Industrial Exchange building. He became a salesman and estate jewelry buyer before moving into a nursing home because of the illness. He entertained fellow patients on his guitar for the past two years.

Mr. Coleman’s only child, Dale Coleman Jr. of Parkville, is also a rock guitarist and appears with Pure Gold, Unveiled and the Dale Coleman Duo.

A memorial services will be held at 1 p.m. tomorrow at the Ruck Towson Funeral Home, 1050 York Road.

In addition to his brother and son, survivors include his mother, Virginia Doederlein Coleman of Towson, and three other brothers, Mark Coleman of Bel Air, Randy Coleman of Alexandria, Va., and Jeffrey Coleman of Baltimore. His marriage to the former Georgia Blevins ended in divorce.

Baltimore Afro-American ad, 6/30/1934

One of those Essex urban legends that my late mother Jackie Nickel was never able to verify concerned the existence of a secret African-American speakeasy/nightclub/picnic pavilion/swim club off of Back River Neck Road in Essex. There’s the remnants of a gravel road with a chain linked across it leading to dense woods. But no remnants of a nightclub or picnic pavilions or anything to suggest that this was once an exclusively black summer getaway in Essex. I’ve searched newspaper archives for years and finally got lucky searching the Afro-American. It existed — The Jolly Four Park! Other than ads there are no mentions other than a report of a drowning that occurred during a Fourth of July weekend. And considering that it was the 1930s in Essex, that drowning may have been somewhat suspicious…

Baltimore Afro-American ad, 5/24/1930

THINK BODY OF SWIMMER WAS 4TH REVELER

(Baltimore Afro-American, 7/15/1933)

One more tragedy has been added to those the fourth of July celebration around Baltimore with the finding of the bathing-suit-clad body of an unknown man floating in the water of Hog Pen Creek, near Middle River, Wednesday.

The body of the man, who had evidently drowned or died while swimming, was found the day after the Fourth, floating atop the water of the little creek near Middle River about 1:30 the afternoon by four white men who saw the body from the shore. It was removed to the Baltimore County morgue at Towson for identification and had not been identified Thursday afternoon.

Weighed 200 Pounds

When found, the body was clothed in a bathing suit only, and reported as being that of a man about 200 pounds in weight, five feet six inches tall. The hair was of a copper color and closely cropped.

Ring Only Identification

The only means of identification worn was a gold signet ring with the initials “R.C.” inscribed.

It was said at Waters Grove, near Stemmers Run, and about a mile from where the body was found, by Mrs. M. Waters, that if the man had been a member of the large party attending a picnic at the grove on the day before, his clothes would have been left there. No trace of clothing could be found, she said.

There was another picnic at another shore front place, the Jolly Four Park, Mrs. Waters said but she had heard no reports of anybody’s being missing from that place.

Beliefs of neighboring persons that the man had entered the water on July 4, the day before, were expressed because the body was floating and from first examination had not been decomposed by the elements.

The Baltimore Sun

The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 started at 10:50 a.m. on Feb. 7 and raged on until 5 p.m. the next day.

The fire began inside the John E. Hurst & Company building, causing an explosion that sent flames on to adjacent buildings. In minutes, surrounding buildings were ablaze and the fire continued to sweep through parts of downtown, in large part due to wind and lack of standardized fire-fighting equipment. Calls for help were telegraphed to other cities including Philadelphia, New York, and Washington D.C., who sent assistance.

According to the Fire Museum of Baltimore, some 1,231 and 1,200 National Guardsmen were needed as part of the effort. In about 30 hours, 140 acres of downtown Baltimore had burned, taking down 1,526 buildings and 2,500 businesses in its fury.

Two years later, The Baltimore Sun reported that the city had risen from the ashes and “One of the great disasters of modern time had been converted into a blessing.”

The Sun’s Jacques Kelly (whose grandmothers were present in Baltimore when the fire occurred) speaks more on the fire that ravaged and destroyed parts of downtown Baltimore and its aftermath:
“Slideshow: Great Baltimore Fire of 1904″ at The Baltimore Sun.

Jimmie Kimmel poked fun at Steven Tyler’s creepy leer when Baltimore’s Hallie Day performed on American Idol.

Hallie Day on Facebook

In the story above, Hallie returns home to Baltimore to live in this shack.

By Rebecca J. Rosen (The Atlantic, 2/14/2012)

There have been many, many times over the last few decades when a new technology delivered a certain moment of awe: the first time I saw a video stream over the Internet, or the first time I navigated a touchscreen. But what must it have been like for those in the 19th century who learned of the ability to send information — Morse code — across electrical lines at speeds previously inconceivable?

Wikipedia.org

Writer and technologist John Battelle is researching early responses to the new telegraph technology, and says that “the invention incited an innate religious response.” The machine, he notes, “as such a massive shift in the possible, it was best to ascribe its power to God.” Fittingly, when Samuel Morse sent a message to open the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, he selected a Biblical quotation as his text: “What Hath God Wrought.”

Inspired by Battelle’s description, I decided to go looking into the archives of the Baltimore Sun, which had closely covered the progress of the Baltimore-Washington line (and whose archives are available going back to 1837 on ProQuest). I didn’t find the religious sensibility he described, but what I did find pulses with an earlier iteration of the technological hope and wonder that we continue to experience today. Below are a few of my favorite clips.

May 31, 1844:

“Prof. Morse’s Telegraph has already, during the first week of its operations, been proved to be of the greatest public importance. Time and space has been completely annihilated.”

Continue reading “Time and Space Has Been Completely Annihilated” at The Atlantic.