The 1950s: supper clubs and hotel lounges

The clubs of the 1950s

The decade drank in dining rooms: Fort Wayne's 1950s nightlife was not yet a nightclub scene in the later sense; it was the supper-club pattern — dinner, a cocktail lounge, and entertainment under one roof, much of it in the downtown hotels. The grandest surviving description is the Indiana Room of the Hotel Indiana, the hotel that opened in May 1928 wrapped around the Emboyd (later Embassy) Theatre at Harrison and Jefferson. The hotel's period advertising called the Indiana Room "one of the most beautiful rooms in America," combining a café, a cocktail lounge, and a circular bar, "famous for foods and beverages — popular prices — music and entertainment — no minimum cover charge." Through the 1950s that room, and rooms like it, were where the city took its evenings out. Down the street, the Hotel Keenan at Washington and Harrison — dedicated in 1923 as Fort Wayne's largest and finest hotel — advertised its own beautiful cocktail lounge beside its air-conditioned dining room and Egyptian coffee shop, and hosted the convention and banquet trade the Indiana Room fed on.

The rooms follow the boulevards: The decade's other documented marker is geographic. In 1957 the Rib Room opened on East State Boulevard — Fort Wayne Magazine calls it a Fort Wayne staple since 1957 — a steakhouse with its lounge, planted not downtown but in the East State corridor the postwar subdivisions were filling. The neighborhood tavern side of the same decade is told in this section's tavern entries: Hughie's Tap took over the old Calhoun Street saloon in 1954, and Henry's opened on West Main in 1959. The pattern of the 1950s, on the record reached, is those three layers at once — the hotel supper rooms downtown, the first boulevard steakhouse lounges, and the neighborhood bars — and no stand-alone dance club of the decade survives in the press or directory record reached for this section.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, "Hotel Indiana" (Places) — the Hotel Indiana's period postcard copy: the Indiana Room's café, cocktail lounge, and circular bar, "music and entertainment — no minimum cover charge"; the hotel's May 1928 opening and its 1971 closing.
2. ACGSI, "Hotel Keenan" (Places), with ARCH, Inc. — the Keenan's advertised cocktail lounge, dining room, and Egyptian coffee shop; dedicated November 24, 1923; demolished October 20, 1974.
3. FortWayne.com, "Visit: 46805" (Fort Wayne Magazine) — the Rib Room on East State Boulevard, "a Fort Wayne staple since 1957."
4. The Oyster Bar house history and Visit Fort Wayne — Hughie's Tap (1954) and Henry's (1959), told in the tavern entries of this section.