Two and a half years ago I wrote the first newspaper article I’d written in a while, about the closing of Meyers’ Ace Hardware Store in Bronzeville. The store sat in what used to be the Sunset Cafe, and later the Grand Terrace Cafe. When Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago, he was hired by Carroll Dickerson’s band, which played at the cafe every night, with Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, and other future jazz greats in the crowd every night. Armstrong rose to the band leader, with a young Cab Calloway as his master of ceremonies.
The Cafe was closed after a police raid, and the Grand Terrace moved in. By then, Armstrong had moved to New York and Earl Hines became the leader of the house band. The Terrace closed in 1940 and it became a hardware store in 1962, closing in 2017.
Since then it’s reopened as a makeup boutique shop, but fortunately the owners have kept the artwork on the wall.
I’d started as a newspaper reporter, but after an unfortunate stint in book publishing I tried going back to my roots with the story, which ran in the South Side Weekly. But I became overwhelmed by my symptoms and panicked that I’d be “found out” (whatever that means). I told the editor to only run it online, which they did. I don’t know why I was so nervous, since I had nothing to hide.
I haven’t written an article-length anything since, at least publicly, and this blog is an attempt to get back into the habit.