Gayety Theatre, 405 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, Independent City, MD

Significance: The Gayety Theatre is the oldest remaining burlesque theater in Baltimore. This section of Baltimore Street is locally known as "The Block," and constitutes the last vestige of an area of the city primarily known, from World War I to the 1970s for the preponderance of adult-theme businesses, such as bars, bookshops, arcades and burlesque theaters. "The Block" is characterized by two and three story early-twentieth-century masonry commercial buildings (most greatly altered at pedestrian level) and is contained, to the east, by the massive concrete police station, built ca. 1982, and to the north, by a 14-story brick city office building erected in 1983. The elaborate ornament of the Gayety facade typifies the exuberance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century theater design as a sub-genre, in this case drawing on both Baroque and Art Nouveau ornament for its eye-catching and fanciful decorative vocabulary.
Survey number: HABS MD-1123
Building/structure dates: 1905 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: after 1969 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1984 Subsequent Work