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Built in the aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, the Gayety Theatre opened on February 5, 1906鈥攎aking this building the oldest remaining burlesque theater in Baltimore. While the theatre interior was subdivided into three separate spaces in 1985, the Gayety still boasts an elaborate, eye-catching, and fanciful fa莽ade (designed by architect John Bailey McElfatrick) that is a wonderful example of the exuberance of theater design in the period.

The Gayety is the venerable keystone of 鈥淭he Block鈥� on Baltimore Street long known as a destination for adult entertainment. 鈥淭he Block鈥� is somewhat of a misnomer, as the area of arcades, bars, burlesque houses and adult bookshops extended east along Baltimore Street from Calvert Street for approximately eight blocks in the middle third of the 20th century. Due to various cultural forces, and particularly to a concerted 鈥渁nti-smut鈥� campaign during the mayoral tenure of William Donald Schaefer in the early 1980s, most of this extensive commercial sub-cultural landscape no longer exists, and 鈥渢he Block鈥� is, in fact, a small representative of a once-thriving red-light district.

The Gayety began after the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed the offices of The German Correspondent. While some downtown theatres moved to Howard Street after the fire, The Gayety, Lubin鈥檚 Nickelodeon and Vaudeville 鈥渄uplex鈥� directly across the street, The Victoria (later known as The Embassy) and The Rivoli all remained in the area and defined this stretch of Baltimore Street as a 鈥減opular entertainment鈥� center, with an emphasis on burlesque and vaudeville. Despite the connotations acquired later, burlesque and vaudeville were mainstream forms of entertainment aimed at the working and middle classes.

By World War I, the Gayety鈥檚 neighbors had made the switch to showing movies. In the 1920s and 1930s, cinema began to supplant burlesque and, especially, vaudeville as the chief form of low-cost popular entertainment across the United States. Burlesque houses, such as The Gayety, promoted more risqu茅 acts in the effort to give the public something that they couldn鈥檛 get in movies, especially after the adoption of the Hayes production code in 1932, which not only banned nudity but placed Draconian restrictions on sexual content and references in film.

From its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s鈥攚hen The Gayety鈥檚 bill included nationally prominent comedians such as Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton鈥攖he Gayety was a 鈥渢op-of-the-line鈥� burlesque house. In this period (just before and after World War II) iconic strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Blaze Starr, Sally Rand, Valerie Parks and Ann Corio performed there. Following the Second World War, more arcades, as well as adult bookshops, peep shows and show bars cropped up to fill in the vacant spaces and gradually redefined East Baltimore Street as a 鈥渞ed light district,鈥� analogous to New York鈥檚 Times Square, Washington, DC鈥檚 14th Street and New Orleans鈥檚 legendary Bourbon Street. By the 1960s, The Gayety no longer hosted headline performers, and local news features surrounding the cataclysmic fire in 1969 tended to emphasize nostalgia for its decline. In this sense, The Gayety Theater Building encapsulates the history of burlesque as an entertainment form and its interaction with civic form in the 20th century United States.

Nostalgic descriptions of performances at The Gayety and its peers indicate that, by today鈥檚 standards, the performances were quite modest. However, the aura of taboo was a large part of what sustained burlesque in general, and The Gayety in particular, through the mid-twentieth century.