The building in 2008. Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Club Bali, formerly at 1901 14th Street, was a popular place where jazz greats like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway performed. the building used to be home to Arena Stage’s Community Engagement Studio, but now is vacant.

Benjamin Caldwell opened Club Bali in 1943 as mainly a venue for live music. The club also featured tap dancers and chorus girls. Club Bali supposedly held 200 or 300 patrons, one of the largest clubs in the area. Club Bali was one of the first clubs to successfully charge a cover to get in. In the 1940s it was five dollars (which was a lot of money in the 1940s!). And, in contrast to the name, they also served a not-often found cuisine in the time: Korean food prepared by George Kim.

The building that housed Club Bali was built in 1907 as a billiards and bowling alley (PDF). In 1937, the building featured the exhibit “National Memorial to the Progress of the Negro Race in America.”

Arena stage building, now “It was a magic place, its rear garden lit with strings of lights in the summertime…the magic often continued late into the night, as name entertainers, winding down after formal engagements, played to intimate gatherings into the wee hours of the morning in the many tucked-away, after-hours clubs located throughout the neighborhood.”(from U Street Heritage trail).

In 1950, owner Benjamin Caldwell was convicted of jury tampering in a gambling case. After his conviction, the former Club Bali housed numerous restaurants and clubs in the 1950s and 1960s, including Cafe Trinidad. It eventually became Jack Wiseman’s Lounge. In 1975, Jack Wiseman was murdered in his office in the building. Police attributed his murder to participation in a heroin drug ring, but his murder was never solved.

After Jack Wiseman’s murder, the building remained vacant until a string of theater companies, starting in the 1980s, used it as their home. Now, it’s vacant again when Arena Stage’s Community Engagement Studio left some time in 2010.