On a busy strip of 22nd Street South in St. Petersburg’s Midtown neighborhood, the smell of fried catfish from Lorene’s Fish House spills into the street. A souped-up Cadillac zooms past, bumping rap music. At a nearby stretch of public housing, residents take refuge from the heat, sitting on their cool porches.
Next door to Lorene’s, young people dance to hip-hop artists like UNK next door in a tin-roofed Quonset hut that once housed jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Sarah Vaughan.
The Royal Theatre has come full circle, from its heyday as a black movie house in the days before desegregation, to a new haven for young people who gather to make the music of their generation.
The rebirth is barely evident from the outside. The Quonset hut got a facelift in 2004, but otherwise seems little changed since it opened in 1948.
But its journey through history is told through the memories of those who found a sense of themselves and their community at the Royal.
One generation sees the Royal as a monument to a tight-knit community that persevered in the face of segregation. Another remembers it as a place that was shuttered and neglected during the racial and economic turbulence of the 1960s.
The young people who gather at the Royal Theatre these days only know snippets of that history, if that. For them, it’s a place to give voice to art through poetry, music, dance and theater.
“I heard it was 10 cents to see a movie,” says Ameen Nurul-haqq, 12. He’s a member of the Royal Boyz, a three-person rap group that records and performs at the theater. “My grandma used to go there.”
He’s more interested in what the building offers today.
“Instead of getting in trouble, we have something to do,” Nurul-haqq says. “I’d probably be watching TV or sleeping if I wasn’t here.”
When the Royal Theatre opened during the post World War II boom, it became one of the two movie houses in St. Petersburg, Fla., that catered to black people; the other was the Harlem Theater on Third Avenue South.
During the day and evening, the Royal was a movie theater where kids could buy a bag of popcorn for 10 cents and use soda bottle caps for admission. At night, the adults took over, gathering after stage shows at the nearby Manhattan Casino.
Wilbur Hunter, 58, a St. Petersburg native, still affectionately describes the 22nd Street strip by its nickname, “the Deuces.”
The city bus driver has seen the neighborhood weather many changes, from segregation and desegregation, to the 1996 racial riots incited when St. Petersburg Police shot and killed TyRon Lewis, 18, an unarmed black man who had refused to get out of his car when he was pulled over for speeding.
Hunter points to a couple of boarded-up shops sandwiched between Mt. Zion Progressive Church and St. Petersburg College.
“This was once a lively community. We were self-sufficient, there were doctors, lawyers, businesses on this corner,” Hunter says. “Things have changed for the worse.”
Ironically, the end of segregation also meant the end of the Royal Theatre. It closed in 1966, and remained silent and empty for almost a decade.
It reopened in 1975 as a Boys Club. But the building had suffered from years of neglect. It was renovated and reopened in 2004, as part of efforts to transform Midtown.The refurbished theater now is home to the Boys & Girls Club of the Suncoast, a program dedicated to the arts.
Hunter remembers the Royal Theatre as a lifeline of the community in the 1950s, where black people congregated every Saturday and Sunday. He paid for admission into the theater with soda bottle caps and watched movies from sunup to sundown.
“It was a treat to go to the Royal Theatre,” Hunter says. “It was employed by blacks, managed by blacks. It was our own island.”
Irene B. McCall, 60, and Paul Stewart, 59, were childhood friends and classmates who attended Jordan Park Elementary, 16th Street Junior High (now Johns Hopkins Elementary) and Gibbs High School.
Talking about the Royal is like taking a trip back in time together.
“Ahhh, I remember the Royal Theatre,” McCall chuckles. “It’s the place where you met your sweetheart.”
It was a different neighborhood back then, McCall recalls. She says everybody knew each other by name, and the teachers and adults cared about the children.
“The Royal Theatre was a mecca for black people in the area. Everybody from the Southside came there,” McCall says. She wasn’t allowed to go to the theater unless she had finished her chores and gone to church the weekend before. “I wouldn’t let anything stand in my way of getting into the Royal.”
But things changed after Gibbs High School was integrated in 1964.
The Civil Rights Act, which outlawed forced segregation in education and public places, coupled with the construction of Interstate 275, fragmented wide areas of the black community. As a result, many businesses closed and the identity of the community suffered, according to the city of St. Petersburg Historic Landmarks Web site.
As the traditional economy collapsed, drugs and gangs gained a foothold in the neighborhood.
The riots of 1996 were a low point for the neighborhood. But, Herbert Murphy, director of the Royal’s Boys & Girls Club, says the riots prompted positive change.
“God bless the riots. They tore down the projects and finally took notice of the community,” Murphy says of the city government.
Redevelopment projects revitalized vacant lots and boarded-up buildings in the 5.5-square-mile of Midtown, the area bounded by Second Avenue North, 30th Avenue South, and Fourth and 34th streets.
One of the projects was returning the Royal Theatre to its original glory. In 2004 the theater was designated a historic building by the city.
Murphy says the Royal Theatre has become a beacon of light in the community that helps young people have hope and pacify their anger.
“It is teaching the young people here to take a break from their socioeconomic reality,” Murphy says. “Just like segregation, when blacks lived with the stigma of being poor and second-class citizens, they turned to the Royal Theatre.”
In that way, the Royal is reclaiming a bit of its history, and bridging the time between generations.
Stewart, the Gibbs High grad who used to meet his sweethearts at the Royal, remembers the summer months when the theater would host talent shows and declare hometown celebrities.
“It was like ‘American Idol’ back in the day,” he says.
After the show, Stewart would harmonize with his friends under the dim street light in the theater parking lot: “That was the highlight of the Royal Theatre for me.”
Now it’s Ameen Nurul-haqq’s turn to make music at the Royal. His rap group, the Royal Boyz, laid down tracks in the studio at the Royal on a recent afternoon. Later, the 12-year-old showed off his moves at an impromptu dance party. Surrounded by admirers, he shook his elbows, pumped his chest and waved his arms in an urban dance style called krumping.
“I’m a shooting star and you’re just a comet,” he raps. “I’m hotter than you can handle. Picture this, I’m the sun and you’re just a candle.”