[1] All of the biggest stars in black entertainment, including those in jazz and blues such as Cab Calloway, performed at the Royal.
Singer Louis Jordan, Duke Ellington, The Tympany Five, Etta James, Nat King Cole, The Platters, The Temptations, and The Supremes, as well as a 40-piece, all-female band touring with Count Basie called the Sweethearts of Rhythm, were all performers at the Royal.
[3][4] As middle-class, white flight from Old West Baltimore continued during the 1960s and 1970s and accelerated after Pennsylvania Avenue was damaged during the civil rights riots, the entire community began a period of long decline.
[1] The Royal Theater Marquee Monument was to be phase one of an ongoing series of projects that the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative (PARC) would lead.
However, widespread urban blight still remains: the entire Pennsylvania Avenue corridor has long since been razed, and nothing survives there today insofar as theaters.