The dictionary defines a pipe dream as "a fantastic notion or vain hope." This effectively describes John Grant's grand visions for a moldering midtown Baltimore relic. We're standing before a beige terra-cotta and brick building at 5 W. North Ave.--a little bit of London wedged between a McDonald's and a lake-trout carry-out. It's the Parkway Theatre, built in 1915 and modeled after the West End theater in London's Leicester Square. The building's mammoth marquee is long gone, and it hasn't hosted a film since the '70s. The place is a forlorn ghost. But Grant, a 55-year-old retired Air Force engineer, dreams of changing that. He hopes to restore the Parkway into a palace: an 800-seat venue for film, music, and performance, offering restaurant and bar service.
"I'm a man of modest means and I'm going way out on a limb in all this," Grant says. "I just have a love for these old theaters."
A first step has been taken in this quixotic quest. Grant has a contract on the theater (and an adjacent rowhouse, to house the kitchen), and has until mid-September to come up with financing. The price he describes only as "less than $400,000." But obviously a lot more than that is needed to put the Parkway back in the pink. With a flashlight dangling from his belt loop and a hard hat on his head, Grant seems geared up to explore a crumbling cave.
"Touring the Parkway is like exploring the Titanic, only you don't need a diving suit," he says.
A previous tenant carved a large, whitewashed assembly room out of the first-floor lobby and part of the seating area. Exit this room and you find yourself in a vast egg-shaped auditorium. A dusty, red velvet curtain spans a rococo proscenium arch. A balcony stretches back into the shadows overhead. The modest North Avenue facade gives no clue to the theater's size and grandeur. Well, make that badly faded grandeur.
"There's plenty of work to be done in here," Grant deadpans.
A fair portion of the ornate plasterwork is water-damaged or missing. A plaster-restoration expert estimated it would take $100,000 or more to restore the elaborate decorations. (The entire theater cost only about $120,000 to build.) Only two of the original eight large, oval-shaped oil paintings are in place along the walls. "I don't know if the other paintings can be tracked down, or if we'll have to re-create them," Grant says.
Also missing is the Parkway's original theater organ--the massive, wind-driven instrument that created music and sound effects to accompany silent movies. The chambers used to house the pipes remain, and Grant's mission truly becomes a "pipe dream" when he describes plans to reinstall an organ. He's a member of a local theater-organ club that has an instrument that could be placed in the Parkway.
"It's important that we have an organ," he says. "It may go a long way to getting people to come here."
Curiously, Grant had never heard of the Parkway until a few months ago, not long after he moved to Baltimore from Prince George's County. But his interest in hoary old theaters goes back to his Roanoke, Va., childhood and an uncle who tried to save a crumbling theater there, the Academy of Music, from demolition in the '50s. The effort failed, but not before the uncle salvaged some of the theater's decorative interior pieces--columns, scrolls, cherubs, and so forth--for display in his home.
"I was always intrigued by those pieces," Grant says. "So when I drove by the Parkway earlier this year and saw the FOR SALE sign, I just called [the number posted]. Perhaps I can, in a way, make my now-deceased uncle's dream come true."
Some dust-covered marble stairs lead us to a second-floor lobby area and the steeply angled balcony (today we'd call this stadium seating). Continuing upward, we reach the projection booth and the rusted, ragged remains of two '50s-vintage carbon-arc film projectors. The cramped rooftop room is ankle-deep in film clippings.
"I don't know if any of the film is historical," Grant says. "I did find a piece with Bob Hope on it."
Mercifully, our tour doesn't include the basement "swimming pool" (so called because its floor is flooded with water 6 inches deep). I'd seen enough. The Parkway is clearly a grande dame--but one in need of a serious face-lift. Grant thinks it will cost a cool million or more to put the old place back together. He's looking for investors, partners, grants, gifts--and miracles--to pull it off.
"I'm trying to approach it unemotionally," he says as we leave the shadowy netherworld for the glaring light of North Avenue. "It has to work economically, though I may set [the facility] up as nonprofit. I often wonder, though, will this be my legacy or my folly?" 
Visit jrgspace.homestead.com/index.html to learn more about the Parkway project.
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