The 1960s: the lounge fades, the bars take the music

The clubs of the 1960s

An ending written in demolitions: The 1960s are the lounge era's long twilight in Fort Wayne. The Hotel Indiana closed in 1971 and the Keenan, after fires in 1969 and 1974 and a remodeling that could not save it, was demolished on October 20, 1974 — eleven blasts, the Journal Gazette's retrospective records — taking the grand-hotel cocktail-lounge circuit down with them. The supper-club format the Indiana Room embodied did not return to Fort Wayne for a generation; when Fort Wayne Magazine praised Club Soda's 1999 opening as a martini-and-jazz room, it wrote that it was unlike anything the city had seen for several decades.

Bars replace coffeehouses: The decade's shift is documented in a single preserved caption. A News-Sentinel photograph of the entertainers Charles Allen and Steve Black, copied into the county genealogical society's timeline, describes both men as part of the entertainment scene "in the late '60s, when bars replaced coffeehouses as the centers of musical activity" — the city's own paper of record marking the moment the drinking room, not the coffeehouse or the hotel lounge, became the ordinary home of live music. The working rooms of that shift that survive in the record are the taverns of this section — Neal Barille renamed Hughie's Tap as Neal's Oyster Bar in 1963 and made it a professionals' haunt — and, on the east side, Black Fort Wayne's ballroom circuit, whose documented peak here is the Hollywood Ballroom's newspaper advertisement for Ike and Tina Turner on Memorial Day, May 30, 1968; that circuit is the Music section's record, and is pointed to rather than retold. No dedicated 1960s dance-club roster survives in the sources reached; the decade's nightlife, as the record holds it, is lounges closing and bars filling.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, 1980–1989 Timeline of Allen County — the News-Sentinel photograph caption for Charles Allen and Steve Black ("the late '60s, when bars replaced coffeehouses as the centers of musical activity"), and the Keenan demolition item.
2. ACGSI, "Hotel Keenan" and "Hotel Indiana" (Places) — the Indiana Hotel's 1971 closing; the Keenan's fires of 1969 and 1974, its 1972 remodeling, and its October 20, 1974 demolition, the latter from Corey McMaken's Journal Gazette retrospective "1974: Explosive demolitions of Van Orman, Keenan hotels" (July 25, 2019).
3. FortWayne.com, "Best of: Fort Wayne Cocktail Hours" — Club Soda's 1999 opening as a format "unlike anything the city had seen for several decades," the measure of the supper-club era's absence.
4. Music section of this history — the Hollywood Ballroom, May 30, 1968; cross-referenced here, not retold.