Until the late 1960s in most parts of this country, black entertainers were welcomed in the nation's top-rate entertainment establishments when they came to perform, but turned away from most white-owned hotels. The most prominent of them -- Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, not to mention black athletes, academicians and politicians, were not accepted in Baltimore's top downtown, hotels -- the Southern, Emerson and Lord Baltimore. Those stars usually stayed in one of two hotels, in the area of North and Pennsylvania avenues: The York and Smith hotels.
There is very little written history of these hotels. To put together thumbnail profiles, we coaxed recollections from long-ago patrons.
* The York Hotel: This popular four-story hostelry was located on the northeast corner of Dolphin and Madison streets and was known as the "hotel where the big stars stayed." They included not only those who played at the all-black Royal Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, but also downtown at the all-white Hippodrome Theater.
Victorine Adams, a former member of the city council, remembers that it was at the York Hotel in 1946 that she helped organize the Colored Women's Democratic Campaign Committee of Maryland.
* The Smith Hotel, at Druid Hill Avenue and Paca Street, was probably Baltimore's longest-lived and largest black hotel. It was built in 1912 by politician Thomas "Tom" Smith, known in Baltimore political circles as "the black Jack Pollack," a favorable reference to the late Northwest Baltimore Caucasian political king.
Smith's hotel featured lots of marble, mahogany wood and red carpeting. The hotel, which closed in 1938, had a reputation for attracting free spenders, particularly gamblers from New York and Chicago. "Tom Smith served the finest bourbon whiskey in all of Baltimore -- of any establishment, black or white," recalls retired District Court Judge William H. Murphy.
Locally, the era of such hotels officially ended in 1963 when a public accommodations bill outlawing such racial segregation took effect. But memories of the York and Smith hotels live on.