Owner of The Goddess strip club hopes Babe Ruth link can work magic
The Bambino once owned and lived in the three-story building at 38 S. Eutaw St. and ran a bar there, making the site a precious physical reminder of Ruth in the city where he was born.
The owner of The Goddess strip club hopes the Ruth connection can save his business.
Baltimore has obtained legal authority to condemn the club and between 40 and 60 other properties to make room for a thriving entertainment corridor.
Goddess owner George Kritikos is working to have the building nominated to the National Register of Historic Places and the city's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, hoping that will protect the place.
Long before strippers moved in, the bar was known as Ruth's Cafe. Ruth bought the building after he helped the Boston Red Sox win the 1915 World Series. He lived in the building during the offseason, tending bar with his father and teaching neighborhood children how to box in a back room.
A photograph a few feet from the strip club's stage shows Ruth and his father. A hunting dog sits on a wooden chair, while a man in a fedora leans against the bar, drink in hand.
Ruth's adopted daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, 87, says her father spoke fondly of buying the bar. "He was so proud that he was in a position to do that for his father," Stevens said. "I would dearly love to see that building restored."
Michael Gibbons, executive director of Baltimore's Babe Ruth Museum, recommends the building to "baseball pilgrims on their Babe Ruth trail."
Only a few sites associated with Ruth remain in Baltimore. His birthplace is now the Babe Ruth Museum, but the place where he spent much of his childhood — St. Mary's Industrial School — doesn't even bear his name.
Then there is The Goddess, billed as home to the "Friendliest Girls in Town!"
The club enjoys a prime location. Hundreds of Orioles fans on game nights stream past the building and others that include fancy hotels, renovated theaters and luxury apartments.
"When it's like this, you can drop a needle and it won't hit the sidewalk," Kritikos said. "Anybody who knows anything about business knows this corner is a gold mine."
The location led Kritikos, 40, to invest his life savings in the club. He acquired it eight years ago for $450,000 and says he has spent $300,000 renovating the building, including the entryway, near where Ruth's father died in 1918 after falling and hitting his head during a brawl.
"Everything we did in our life is riding here," said Kritikos, a Greek immigrant who came to the United States at 16. "... For them to come and tell us, 'thank you very much, we'll take it from here'? It doesn't seem right."