Not quite as well known as its neighbor across the street, Grace's Little Belmont was nonetheless and integral part of Atlantic City's once-vibrant Kentucky Avenue night club scene.
Spend significant time anywhere in the nation and you’ll likely hear locals lament about how times have changed, and how the good old days are long gone. Newcomers may brush this aside as wistful drivel, but so often the nostalgia associated with Atlantic City’s past is spoken of with a special brand of sincerity — particularly a section of Kentucky Avenue between Arctic and Atlantic avenues.
The area was known as “KY and the Curb,” and became a jazz mecca and the premier nightclub district for Atlantic City’s African-American residents and tourists in the mid-1900s. But because the district didn’t really start heating up until others were winding down, visitors of all races and walks of life would flock there from the far corners of town to a warm welcome.
The centerpiece was Club Harlem, but directly across the street was a highly popular hangout called Grace’s Little Belmont. That club, owned by Hernan Daniels and his wife, Grace, thrived from the mid-1930s through the late ’70s.
“When the 500 Club [further south on Missouri Avenue, and famously owned by Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato] and others let out, that’s pretty much when Club Harlem and Grace’s Little Belmont would just be getting started,” says Ike “Nick” Nicholson, stage manager/music director for a summer series of Boardwalk jazz shows put on by the Chicken Bone Beach Historical Society since 2000. “Some of the employees and the people at the 500 would come up to Kentucky, and they’d be bouncing back and fourth between Club Harlem and Grace’s Little Belmont. They sort of fed off one another. Club Harlem was the keynote on that street and had a 6 o’clock breakfast show there. Grace’s featured a really popular artist in the summertime named Wild Bill Davis, who had done some things with Duke Ellington.”
Davis is also credited with helping to popularize the Hammond B-3 organ as a jazz instrument, and his arrangement of the song “April in Paris” was made into a huge hit by the Count Basie Orchestra in 1955. The Wild Bill Davis Swing Organ Quartet recorded two live albums at Grace’s Little Belmont, the first coming in 1966 when Davis teamed with his friend and tenor saxophonist Johnny Hodges, a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
In 1967 he recorded another album, Midnight To Dawn, there. Davis would end every live show with what would become his signature song.
“The song that he ended every show with was ‘April In Paris,’ and he’d wrap up each show by saying, ‘Not anutha futha,’” says Nicholson, a drummer who would occasionally sit in with the Wild Bill Davis Quartet as a young man.
Ike’s Corner on Tennessee Avenue (about two blocks north) was owned by Nicholson’s father and encompassed a bar, a liquor store and 10 apartments. The senior Nicholson also owned a record shop called Ike’s Records across from Grace’s Little Belmont, and would sometimes drop his son off with Grace Daniels if he had business elsewhere.
“My father was very good friends with Hernan Daniels, and maintained an alliance with Grace after Hernan passed away,” says Nick Nicholson. “She not only had Grace’s Little Belmont downstairs, she also had a beauty salon upstairs next to her apartment, and when I was a kid and my father had to go somewhere, he’d always leave me with Miss Grace — so she was sort of like halfway babysitting me. She had a beautiful apartment. There was some outstanding mahogany furniture up there.”
Grace’s Little Belmont, says Nicholson, was smaller than Club Harlem and featured a horseshoe-style bar off the entrance. One of its barmaids was Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, a former Vaudeville singer and dancer — and the mother of Sammy Davis Jr.
“Baby Sanchez [who passed away in 2000 at age 95] was good friends with my mother, and she was a very talented entertainer in her own right back in the day,” says Nicholson. “There were usually about five barmaids that pretty much got locked into that horseshoe bar, because Grace’s business was mostly people coming in off the beach for the matinee shows and the night shows that they did, and the place would get so crowded they basically got trapped. Even though she had some booths in that area, it would get so crowded that the barmaids couldn’t get through and had to wait on people from behind the bar. [Sanchez] did a bang-up business from back there.”
Gambling was far from being legalized in Atlantic City back then, but nearly every nightclub and bar had some form of it going on, says Nicholson. In between Grace’s and an establishment called Jerry’s Barbecue was an alley where a popular game of chance took place.
“People would play a game called the ‘skin game’ [for a hilarious take on this, read The Skin Game and Other Atlantic City Capers by Joseph Wilkins]. It wasn’t legal, but as long as people behaved themselves [the police] pretty much looked the other way.
“There were a lot of things that were looked the other way back then,” adds Nicholson. “A whole lot of stuff was going on, and the women were the key to the whole thing. You had Larry Steele’s Smart Affairs Dancers [at Club Harlem], the waitresses everywhere were all very, very attractive young ladies, and when you had the women there — that attracted the men.”
Do you have any memories of Grace's Little Belmont? Leave a comment below.
Kelsey and Kim Jackson, with help from fellow local Allen Thomas, have been drawing crowds to Atlantic City’s Kentucky Avenue with jazz, soul and R&B.
Aretha Franklin stops at the Taj Mahal Oct. 6. She chats with Atlantic City Weekly on her biopic, the upcoming presidential election, her favorite singers and a getaway long ago with Bob Dylan.
Every Friday and Saturday night, BB’s Beer and Burgers hosts a rotating list of four blues artists who have toured and/or recorded with many of the biggest names in the business. On Sunday from 6-9pm, jazz artists perform at Ono Chinese Bistro, which also offers some of the most stunning views around.
“As a matter of fact, before I moved to New York, I saw Coltrane at his mother’s house one day and was talking to him about how I was thinking about going to New York and he wished me luck.”
On Tuesday, Feb. 22, groundbreaking will commence on the newest Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian’s 19th museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, will occupy a five-acre site on Constitution Avenue between 14th and 15th streets N.W., between the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Atlantic City, like many other U.S. cities, once had segregated beaches, but they didn't start out that way. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Blacks and whites lived side-by-side, worked side-by-side and played side-by-side.
In the summer of 1910, Wellman received a warm welcome in Atlantic City for his impending expedition as he took up residence in the Chalfonte Hotel. A huge balloon house for the America was constructed for $12,000 by the Aero Club of Atlantic City. Visitors could pay a fee to see the airship before its departure.
Nina Simone had never been in a bar, nor had she ever sang before, but both were required for her summer gig at the Midtown Bar, located at 1719 Pacific Avenue, between Indiana and MLK Blvd., and just “two blocks back from the seafront" Atlantic City Boardwalk.
Summertime, and the groovin’ is easy. Tourists fatten the regular jazz crowd cramming Kentucky Avenue, where the night never dies. Inside Club Harlem, they press against the bar and each other, as the organist and his quartet tune up on the bandstand. The music comes fast and the band is tight and the organ looses a torrent of sound. And there’s an added bonus for posterity: the live session is being recorded for an album, a rare occurrence in Atlantic City. This was the scene on the Saturday night of Aug. 9, 1969, when master jazz organist Lonnie Smith and company cut Move Your Hand, an exemplar of ’60s soul jazz, for the legendary Blue Note label. The title song, which became a hit, borrowed its lyric from a joke that Smith’s drummer told about a substitute preacher who couldn’t deliver the sermon because someone else’s hand was covering the text. (The joke is less than hysterical, but the number’s a grabber.) “One night, I was playing a little lick and just happened to say [“move your hand”] to the fellows in the band,” says Smith, now 67 and as busy as ever. “People loved it and always requested it.” It became...
Unlike most people, Dan Fogel had already found his life's calling by the time he was 10 years old. Routinely sneaking out of the second-floor bedroom window of his parent's colonial house in Margate...
SPEND SOME TIME IN ATLANTIC CITY AMID ITS FLASHY CASINOS, the fine restaurants, and the rolling beaches and Boardwalk, and you can’t help but marvel at how far the resort has come. But every step you take is still gently haunted by all that has been here before. Atlantic City wears its history like a comfortable old coat — tattered, but comfortable. From its days as a “health” resort in the 19th century, to its naughty and haughty days of irreverence during Prohibition (highlighted in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire) to its eventual decline and then rebirth as an East Coast gambling mecca, Atlantic City and the region has been attracting visitors since its inception. In this issue, our first “Then & Now” issue, we look at Atlantic City’s long journey to get to this point in time. We look at a resort thriving...
EVEN IF YOU'VE NEVER heard of the band Fourplay, there's a good chance you've heard music by the individual members of the pop-jazz quartet. Consistently staying at the top of the contemporary jazz charts over the course of its 13-year existence, this supergroup of Los Angeles studio musician veterans has appeared, individually and together, with the best of the best in a variety of musical genres over the years. Pianist Bob James, who gave us the theme song to Taxi among many other notable crossover recordings, has teamed with almost every contemporary jazz giant imaginable over the past couple decades. The list includes the late Grover Washington Jr., David Sanborn, Earl Klugh and countless others. Anyone will recognize the playing of Fourplay's bassist Nathan East who has recorded with and backed a multitude of top-notch acts over the years including Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Elton John. Guitarist Larry Carlton, also a reputable session man, was a former member of The Crusaders and appears on more classic albums than can be listed here. Billy Joel's Piano Man, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark and Steely Dan's Katy Lied come to mind. (Don't forget the theme song to Hill Street Blues!) Rounding out...
A banner with the name Slappy White on it hung across Kentucky Avenue all summer. The late comedian and actor (who died in Brigantine in 1995) was booked for the entire season at Atlantic City’s famed Club Harlem. On this particular summer night, however — July 24, 1964, to be precise — hanging above the banner was yet another banner. It read: “Sam Cooke.”
Article:
Best Albums of 2012
Article:
Steve Aoki Talks New Year's Eve in Atlantic City from London
Article:
Tonight's the Night: Neil Young, Trey Anastasio Sandy Benefit Concert at Borgata
Article:
Life in Color New Year's Eve Celebration at Bader Field
Article:
Re-Do AC Music Benefit in Atlantic City for Sandy Victims
Article:
Album Review: Deftones - 'Koi No Yokan'
Article:
Rap Legends Return to House of Blues
1. Artie said... on May 6, 2011 at 10:10AM
“Was there any gambling at Gracie's Little Belmont, as there was at the 500 Club, Babettets, Tuna Club, Bath & Turf Club, etc.?”