We’re incredibly excited to welcome Amy Davis into the American Theatre Architecture Archive this week! As a Thomas R. DuBuque Research Fellow she has the opportunity to visit us in person and work in our collections.
In tribute to her project, we wanted to share with you some records of theatres from Baltimore. We’ll start with the Century Theater.
The late David Naylor in his book “American Picture Palaces” described the story of the Century/Valencia: “In Baltimore, John Eberson inserted a Spanish atmospheric, patrolled by ushers in bullfighter costumes, into a ballroom above an older theater. The Baltimore Valencia (1926) was perched on top of the expansive Century Theater, designed and built five years earlier by John J. Zink. A popular joke around town in 1926 was that, paradoxically, the Valencia was both the newest and oldest theater in the city (because it was “over a century”).” The Valencia was demolished in 1962.