South Jackson Street is blessed with two elegant, white terra cotta buildings with elaborate cornices – the Governor, at Fifth Avenue South, which housed the Ebony Café – and the Rainier Heat & Power Company Building at Maynard Avenue South, where the Congo Room and the Black Elks club were located. You are standing in front of what was once known as the Congo Grill, the Congo Club, or the Congo Room, a storefront that later operated as the Sun Bakery and Café. The Congo Room was a “blind,” which means that the store in front was a cover for the real action in the back room, reached through swinging saloon doors that revealed a horseshoe shaped bar, ballroom and gaming tables. The Congo was night-prowling Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Johnny Reddin’s favorite place to eat in the nightlife district. Reddin once wrote that the establishment’s porterhouse steaks “hung over the edges of the good-sized tray.”
Herman Grimes gives the boys in Gay Jones’ orchestra a few pointers, c. 1940.
(Left to right: Grimes, Carle Rising, Floyd Tebbelman, Sven Sandstrom, Ernie Sears, Freddie Thompson, Dick Krafft, Glenn Martin, Aaron Shearer. (Courtesy of Gaylord Jones)
The Congo Room was located on the ground floor of the Rainier Heat & Power Company Building, pictured here. It was inside
the fifth door up from the corner.
The Black Elks Club was upstairs.
(Washington State Archives)
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According to longtime traditional jazz fan Bob Graf, who also frequented the place, a blackjack table was “going all the time,” and the surface of the bar was always covered with bets. In 1941, Congo Room owner Sherman Spates, who also ran the Green Dot Barber Shop across the street, hired pianist Palmer Johnson to play in a swinging combo with trumpeter Herman Grimes, trombonist Andy Duryea, from North Carolina, and bass player known only as “Longgoody.” Johnson came to Seattle from Los Angeles in 1928 and remained a mainstay of the jazz scene for nearly two decades. Grimes, who later worked briefly with Duke Ellington, hailed from Alabama and spent time in Kansas City bands before Seattle promoter Russell “Noodles” Smith brought him out west. Duryea played with Gene Coy and Dizzy Gillespie.
The Congo Room appears to have operated only a few years during the 1940s.
The Rainier Heat & Power Company Building today. The Congo Room was located in the storefront with the yellow stripes to the right of the door, which reference the former tenant, Sun Bakery.