The Club
The club, a former speakeasy, was located at 17 Piedmont Street, which today is a parking lot in Boston's Bay Village neighborhood. Originally a garage and warehouse complex, the building had been converted to a one-and-a-half-story meandering complex of dining rooms, bars, and lounges. The club offered its patrons dining and dancing in a South Seas-like "tropical paradise" created by artificial palm trees, rattan and bamboo, heavy draperies, and swanky satin canopies suspended from the ceilings, and a roof that could be rolled back in summer for dancing under the stars. The building had acquired a reputation as being a criminal hangout, and this image was enhanced by the murder of its former owner, gangland boss and bootlegger Charles "King" Solomon, also known as "Boston Charlie". He had been gunned down in the men's room of Roxbury's Cotton Club nightclub nearly a decade before, just after the end of Prohibition.
Read more about this topic: Cocoanut Grove Fire
Famous quotes containing the word club:
“In another year I’ll have enough money saved. Then I’m gonna go back to my hometown in Oregon and I’m gonna build a house for my mother and myself. And join the country club and take up golf. And I’ll meet the proper man with the proper position. And I’ll make a proper wife who can run a proper home and raise proper children. And I’ll be happy, because when you’re proper, you’re safe.”
—Daniel Taradash (b. 1913)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)