Cluster
303 South Broadway
When the Klatzke family landed in Baltimore from Russia, shortly before the turn of the century, they acquired a new family name, Cluster. Benjamin I. Cluster came of age at the same time moving pictures were exploding in popularity. Motion Picture Exhibition in Baltimore traces the family to the operation in 1908 of the first Cluster Theater, a little nickelodeon at 667-669 West Baltimore Street. Then came another modest Cluster Theater at 303 South Broadway in East Baltimore. Ben Cluster tore this one down to build the present-day building in 1921. The new 900-seat Cluster had a small balcony, and showed mostly Warner Brothers pictures as a second-run house.
Sonya Gichner of Chevy Chase, a granddaughter of Ben Cluster, recalled that her grandfather adored cars, and drove his beloved Packard too fast. Cluster also welcomed new technology. The Jazz Singer had its second Baltimore showing at his theater in April 1928, when Vitaphone equipment was installed to play “talking and singing” pictures. A year later, Cluster invested in one of the first air-conditioning systems.
The Cluster had a very strict usher, named Casimir, according to Gloria Weber of Fells Point.
He had a uniform with gold braid, gold buttons and epaulets. Casimir was a sharpie. Before the movie started, I remember him coming down the aisle with his flashlight, screaming, ‘Keep your feet off the seat! Sit up! Keep your trash off the floor!’ When he said that, it made things worse. The tiny tots would put the seats up so they could sit on the top of the seat to be higher. Casimir would come down the aisle and say, ‘Put that seat down!’ So he’d move on and the kids would do it again. He policed that theater as if it was his home.
Gloria Weber Fells Point resident
The Cluster closed in 1977. The vertical sign and letters spelling “Cluster” in neon script lettering are gone, but the distinctively shaped marquee, which looks like a lumpy pillow, remains. In the early 1980s, the Cluster showed Chinese melodramas and Kung Fu films, and then it became a porn house called Cinema X. The Cluster had one last gasp as a revival house in the late 1980s. The movie house founded by Russian immigrants now serves the Hispanic population in Upper Fells Point as the Missionary Evangelical Pentecostal Church, Inc.