Baltimore cinema history

posted by Michael Zoldessy on January 23, 2008 at 2:50 am

BALTIMORE, MD — A look at the local history of cinemas past and present:

With the addition of just one new movie house – November’s opening of the Landmark Theatres in Harbor East – the number of Baltimore theaters skyrocketed by a whopping 33 percent.

How times have changed. Over the past century, Baltimore has had more than 100 movie houses, from the palatial – the Grand, the Metropolitan, the Northwood, the Patterson – to the neighborly – the Blue Bell, the Community, the Plaza.

But beginning in the 1960s, theaters began flocking to the suburbs. Parking was easier; the huge movie palaces of the silent era became too expensive to maintain; neighborhoods became places to move away from, rather than grow up in.

Read more in the Baltimore Sun.