On the day of the late Billie Holiday’s 91st birthday, Baltimore City and neighborhood officials gathered to unveil plans to improve a monument in her honor and the surrounding, blighted area.
Planners said they are working toward a “true transformation” of the monument on the corner of Pennsylvania and Lafayette avenues, including removing a brick wall and tall shrubbery now blocking the statue of the famous jazz singer, who grew up in Fells Point.
The statue will be raised onto a 6-foot pedestal and other ideas include linking the intersection’s four corners with benches, landscaping and seating for the former Royal Theater plaza, where summer jazz concerts are held.
“The Planning Department, we don’t do a doggone thing,” said Otis Rolley, director of the city’s Planning Department. “It doesn’t mean anything if we don’t have the implementation agencies and the community pushing us to get things done.”
At the ceremony Friday, one speaker pointed out the sounds of children’s laughter and an ice cream truck and said activists are working for the day when those drown out the noise of police sirens and gunshots in the Upton neighborhood.
The Pennsylvania Avenue corridor and Holiday both have strong ties to the black community and the early civil rights movement. Holiday sang of the struggles of blacks with songs like “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” in jazz clubs duringthe neighborhood’s era as Baltimore’s Harlem.
The conceptual improvement plan also suggests engraving the lyrics of such songs into the sidewalk. The 8-foot statue was built in 1985 and officials said full-scale plans for the plaza never came to fruition.
“A celebration like today can only come when public, private and community stakeholders come together,” said Jim Hamlin of the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”
