Bali Award Winner of 1947: Sarah Vaughan

Bali Award for 1947: Miss Sarah Vaughan, one of the greatest attractions ever to appear in Washington, D.C., At Bennie Caldwell's Club Bali. Presented by the management and press and radio of the District of Columbia this 19th day November, 1947. Godspeed to you and your instrumental voice from our patrons to you the winner of Esquire. Club Bali was a black owned restaurant and nightclub located at 14th and T Street, NW.

The distinguished building at the northeast corner of 14th and T Street today houses a branch of the well known Arena Stage, but for many years it was an important African-American owned restaurant and nightclub known as Club Bali, one of the elite clubs nestled among the many venues that lined 14th and U Streets in the 1930s and 1940s that I researched as part of our work on the Greater U Street “City Within A City” Heritage Trail for Cultural Tourism DC. Its eventual decline hit a low with the 1975 murder of the owner in the building.

Club Bali opened in 1943, joining other watering holes in Washington such as Trader Vic’s in the Capitol Hilton. Club Bali was owned and operated for a time by Benjamin C. Caldwell, and featured live shows along with its own, fourteen piece orchestra located in a bandstand behind the bar.

The club headlined many important acts during the 1940s and early 1950s that played to mixed audiences of black and white patrons, similar to most of the U Street venues. Its cover charge of five dollars ensured an elite crowd of partygoers of the era.

Cab Calloway, Charlie Ventura, Louis Armstrong, Amos Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, Erol Garner, Johnny Hartman, Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday, Morgana King, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Charlie Ventura all performed at Club Bali. Sometimes referred to as the New Bali, it stood out among other venues in the neighborhood, however, by featuring a dinner menu of Korean cuisine, prepared by chef George Kim.

Billie Holliday played Club Bali in 1947 and in 1948, and returned to the Club’s successor, coined Cafe Trinidad, in 1954. Willis C. Nelson served as the musical director at the club for many years. Owner “Bennie” Caldwell was convicted of jury tampering in 1950 in the William “Snags” Lewis gambling and street numbers case, who had been one of his many patrons at Club Bali.

The building became a long succession of restaurants and clubs in the 1950s and 1960s, eventually becoming Jack Wiseman’s Lounge. Jack himself was murdered in his office in the rear of the building in 1975, in what police contributed to participation in a heroine drug ring. The case is still unsolved.

In 1984, the building was converted for use as a branch of Living Stage Theatre Company, founded by Robert A. Alexander in 1966 as a professional improvisational theater that offered participatory workshops to children, youth, teachers, parents, and community members. Living Stage’s main philosophy is based in the belief that everyone is born an artist and the act of creation is the ultimate act of self-affirmation.

Source: The Historical Society of Washington, D. C.; The House History Man Blog by Paul K. Williams