Magic, Mentalism, & The Block

The Blog of Poe's Magic Theatre at the Lord Baltimore Hotel

Issue 6  |  May the 12th, 2026

FEATURE: THE BLOCK, A HISTORY OF BALTIMORE'S MOST NOTORIOUS STREET

Baltimore Street has a reputation. It had one when your grandparents were young, and their grandparents probably had firm opinions about it too. For most of the 20th century, a stretch of East Baltimore Street, about a seven-minute walk from where you're sitting right now, was known simply as The Block. And The Block was Baltimore's long-running, largely unrepentant experiment in what the city preferred to call "adult entertainment" but which, for much of its history, was variety theater with fewer clothes on and considerably better attendance.

It didn't start out scandalous. The clubs along The Block in the 1920s were running fairly standard vaudeville alongside the gambling and the cocktails (Prohibition being, as always, mostly theoretical in Baltimore). Comedy, magic acts, singers, novelty performers, the whole traveling circus of American popular entertainment rotated through. If you were working the East Coast circuit in the 1940s, you played The Block. Usually early in your career, often when you were desperate, and some people played it their entire lives and were completely fine with that.

The burlesque element grew steadily louder from the 1940s forward. The Two O'Clock Club, the Gayety, the Oasis. The Two O'Clock Club ran for decades and pumped serious money through downtown, which city officials found alternately embarrassing and convenient depending on whether an election was approaching. Blaze Starr performed there. If that name doesn't immediately register, it should.

Starr was born Fannie Belle Fleming in West Virginia, arrived in Baltimore in the early 1950s looking for work, and found it fast. She rose to headliner status quickly, became arguably the most famous burlesque performer in the country, and along the way had a well-documented relationship with Louisiana Governor Earl Long that was later made into a film. She eventually ran her own club on The Block for years after her performing career ended. By all accounts she was sharp, funny, businesslike, and thoroughly unbothered by what anyone thought of her. Ideal neighbor for a magic theater.

The Block declined the way everything declines: gradually, then all at once. By the 1980s several clubs had closed, the audience that remained was pulling from a much narrower pool, and video did damage the city couldn't quite reverse. What was left by the turn of the century was mostly a memory the city simultaneously wanted to forget and quietly traded on for atmosphere.

But burlesque didn't die with The Block. It came back, as most art forms come back, wearing different ideas about what the form was actually for. Contemporary neo-burlesque has considerably more to do with comedy, performance art, and deliberate spectacle than the old clubs did, and Tapitha Kix and Charm City Burlesque are working squarely in that tradition. They perform this Sunday at Poe's Magic Theatre, roughly three blocks from where The Block used to run. History has a sense of humor. It doesn't always explain the punchline.

POE'S MAGIC THEATRE THIS WEEKEND

Three shows this weekend. Friday, May 15, brings the Magic Showcase at 8 p.m., the monthly gathering of the Mid-Atlantic's best working magicians under one roof at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. If you've never been, it's the most efficient possible introduction to what live close-up and stage magic actually looks like when the people performing it are genuinely skilled.

Saturday, May 16, TEO returns with Worlds Beyond Imagination at 8 p.m. Billed as "a nerdy adventure in magic," which is accurate. TEO's work leans hard into wonder-soaked, genre-adjacent storytelling that will feel deeply familiar to anyone who has stayed up too late reading fantasy novels or arguing about games. It is, somewhat against the odds, also excellent magic.

Sunday, May 17, is the Burlesque Brunch with Tapitha Kix and Charm City Burlesque, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. See the feature above for why this particular combination of venue, neighborhood, and art form is quietly perfect. Then come see the show.

Tickets for all three at poesmagic.com.

AT THE LORD BALTIMORE HOTEL

The Sunday Burlesque Brunch is the weekend's main event at the hotel beyond the magic programming, running 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. It sells out. Book early.

Worth noting, as always: the LB Tavern is available before shows for dinner. It's recommended to arrive an hour early for dinner or 30 minutes early for drinks, both to take advantage of one of the better-looking rooms in downtown Baltimore and because parking on weekends requires exactly as much patience as you would expect. The valet option exists and is worth considering.

DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE THIS WEEKEND

This particular weekend has the rare quality of being genuinely packed. The Preakness Stakes, the 151st running, takes place Saturday at Laurel Park, Pimlico being mid-renovation and temporarily unavailable for the purpose of hosting one of the most chaotic afternoons in Maryland sport. Laurel Park is in Laurel, not Baltimore, but the city wears the Preakness like a second skin regardless of where the horses are physically running, and downtown will feel it. Plan accordingly if you are driving anywhere Saturday afternoon.

David Byrne plays the Hippodrome both Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th on his Who is the Sky Tour. Byrne grew up in Arbutus, which is approximately six miles and a whole personality shift from where the Lord Baltimore Hotel stands, and this tour stop carries the particular energy of a homecoming that nobody involved is making too big a deal about. Both nights will sell out if they haven't already.

The 5th Annual Doomsday Poe Readathon runs from noon Saturday through noon Sunday at In the Dark Circus Arts. People read Poe aloud for 24 consecutive hours. This is, honestly, fine. Fitting, even.

The Music City Bluegrass and Roots Festival occupies CAA Park noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, two stages, food vendors, Kitchen Dwellers and Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass on the main stage.

Sunday brings the Baltimore Vintage Expo to Union Collective on West 41st Street, free admission, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. It's the 10th anniversary edition, which means the curators have been at this long enough to have developed real opinions, and the clothing, jewelry, and furniture selection tends to reflect that.

The Baltimore Symphony at Meyerhoff is running Lintu Conducts Sibelius through Sunday, with Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu leading Sibelius' Symphony No. 7, and pianist Francesco Piemontesi performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4.

LOCAL MAGIC HISTORY: BALTIMORE AND THE SPIRITUALISTS

Baltimore and Spiritualism had a productive, occasionally embarrassing relationship throughout the second half of the 19th century. When the Fox Sisters effectively launched the American Spiritualist movement in upstate New York in 1848, the craze spread quickly along the East Coast, and Baltimore, with its mix of old money, literary culture, and genuine appetite for the dramatic, turned out to be fertile ground. By the 1860s and 1870s the city had active Spiritualist circles, séance parlors in respectable neighborhoods, and a small industry of mediums willing to communicate with the departed for a reasonable fee.

Some of what passed for Spiritualism in Baltimore was straightforward fraud, the same table-rapping and cabinet tricks that skeptics like Houdini would spend their careers methodically dismantling. But some of it was stranger territory. The city's Spiritualist scene attracted performers who were genuinely skilled at the close-up deception that the séance format demanded, and in at least a few documented cases, people who began as stage conjurers migrated into Spiritualist performance because the audiences were larger and the billing was considerably better. Magic and Spiritualism shared more infrastructure than either tradition wanted to admit.

The Poe connection is obvious enough that it barely needs stating, except that it usually gets stated anyway: Poe died in Baltimore in 1849, the year after the Spiritualist movement effectively began, and the city spent the following decades hosting both his grave and a fairly active Spiritualist community, apparently without anyone noticing the irony.

CFG BANK ARENA

Dark this weekend. The next event at CFG Bank Arena is Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live: Glow-N-Fire on Saturday, May 30. Which is useful information for approximately some readers of this newsletter.

WEEKEND WEATHER

Friday, May 15: High of 71°F, 10% chance of rain. Fine.

Saturday, May 16 (Preakness Day): High of 81°F, 20% chance of rain. Warm enough for the infield crowd to have opinions about it.

Sunday, May 17: Forecast not yet available at time of publication.

Weather forecasts are aspirational documents. The actual weekend may deviate significantly from what the models are currently suggesting, which they always reserve the right to do. Check before making outdoor plans: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=Baltimore&state=MD&site=LWX&textField1=39.2904&textField2=-76.6122

SPORTS

The Orioles are in Washington all weekend, playing the Nationals at Nationals Park. First pitch Saturday, May 16 is 4:05 p.m. EDT, which creates the pleasing possibility of watching two Baltimore institutions compete at the same time on opposite sides of the Beltway. Sunday's game starts at 1:35 p.m.

The 151st Preakness Stakes runs Saturday afternoon at Laurel Park. The Preakness is usually more about the event surrounding the race than the race itself, which ends before most people in the infield have fully oriented themselves. The Black-Eyed Susan Stakes on Friday, May 15, is the traditional warm-up for anyone who takes thoroughbred racing seriously enough to show up twice.

POE'S MAGIC CONFERENCE 2027

Mark it down. Poe's Magic Conference returns April 15 through 18, 2027, at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. Last month's conference set a genuinely high bar for what happens when you put that many serious magic people in a Beaux-Arts hotel for four days. Tickets for 2027 are available now at poesmagic.com. Prices will go up. They always do.

Poe's Magic Theatre is located at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, 20 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201. Tickets and information at poesmagic.com.

The Purloined Dispatch publishes every Tuesday.

Poe's Magic Theatre at the Lord Baltimore Hotel  |  poesmagic.com