July 22, 2005

Sunset Cafe'

By Tedd Carrison

There are few places in Chicago that offer a jazz mecca, prohibition-era artifacts and a box of nails. The unadorned two-story building at 315 E. 35th St. boasts all three with a history that is richer than the throngs of politicians and celebrities that once filed in for Louis Armstrong serenades
and bootleg booze.

Built in 1909, this historic Bronzeville address first served as a repair and storage garage for the incipient automobile market. It was remodeled in 1921 and opened as the Sunset Café, an upscale restaurant and jazz club purportedly run by Al Capone’s organized crime syndicate. A hand-written sign advertising alcoholic drinks for 25 cents remains taped to an upstairs wall, 72 years after prohibition was repealed.

The popular “black and tan” club- so-called for its racially integrated clientele - touted acts like Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman and Jimmy Dorsey. Under new ownership in 1937, the building had a second facelift and reopened as the Grand Terrace Café, another jazz venue
that lasted until the 1950’s when it made way for political offices and the structure’s current enterprise, a hardware store.

David Meyer, one of two brothers who own Meyers Ace Hardware speaks proudly of his store’s past. “I am not bragging,” said Meyers. “But I do not believe there is a place more historically significant, as far as jazz is concerned anyway, in the city of Chicago.”

Meyer is a hurried and busy man shifting erratically from telling the history to searching for appropriate screws and wall anchors as probing customers approach. His office is in the rear of the store where the storied music stage once stood. Behind the computers and piles of paper, an original
mural-clad wall - corrugated to project sound forward - remains as it was decades ago.

“We have tourists coming from all over the world to see this,” said Meyer. He said a group of German jazz musicians traveled to the store just to “feel the jazz” and were so enchanted, they bought out the store’s toilet plungers to use as mutes and washboards to use as percussion instruments.
Harold Lucas, President of the Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council, said he was amazed by the Germans’ reception of the building. “[It was] then I realized the meaning of the Sunset Café in the African American community from an international perspective,” he said. Lucas explained that Europeans developed an affinity for jazz music after World War I when the “expatriate movement” thrust dozens of American writers, artists and musicians across the Atlantic. He said that jazz was one of many art forms these cultural émigrés took with them.

Today, Sue Ish, daughter of famed Opera singer Etta Moten Barnett, enters the store and Meyer still greets her by her maiden name. She speaks fondly of the days when music, not errands, brought her here. “My mother said I couldn’t go to a nightclub until I was 18,” said Ish. “The Grande Terrace
here was where I came. Earl Hines was playing.”

The building was land marked in 1998 and its future is uncertain. Some have called for another jazz club on the site. Though intrigued by the idea, Meyer said he has no intentions of moving the hardware store at this time.