Since 1954

The Room

In the winter of 1954, a horn player named Eugene “Deuce” Calloway leased the basement beneath Voss & Fenwick Haberdashers on East Calumet Alley for eleven dollars a month and a standing tab. He hung a curtain over the coal chute, borrowed six card tables from the Elks lodge upstairs, and told the neighborhood there’d be music on Thursdays.

By spring there was music on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays both, and by the time the haberdashery closed for good in 1961, the room below had outlasted it. The Nocturne Room has changed owners four times, flooded twice, and closed its doors only once — for eleven days in February of 1968, out of respect.

The bar is still the one Deuce built from a bowling alley lane. The stage is still eighteen inches off the floor, close enough that Odessa Vance says she can hear the room breathe between choruses. We would not have it any other way.