The bright lights shone over a 9th Ward nightclub in the late 1940s and 1950s. Finely dressed people came to hear great music, see great entertainers and dine on great food.

Everyone agreed that Club Desire was the place to be.

“Club Desire … made people want to come back to New Orleans,” musician Bobby Love said in the 2020 documentary, “The Untold Story of Club Desire, A Musical Treasure.” “It was New Orleans’ premiere club for many years when segregation tried to stop some things from happening.” 

Charles Armstead opened the club, located at 2604 Desire St., on Mardi Gras night in 1948.

“The ambitious proprietor made sure that his palatial 9th Ward nightclub stood out even on New Orleans’s most festive day,” the Historic New Orleans Collection states. “In an era when the city’s premiere music venues excluded Black patrons, Armstead set the tone from the beginning, determined to make his establishment a cornerstone of the community and an essential stop for some of the country’s most renowned Black performers.”

Fats Domino and Ray Charles started their careers at Club Desire. Count Basie, Billy Eckstine and Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry also performed there. 

There was an “expectation of excellence and elegance that just going to Club Desire required,” Armstead’s granddaughter Dana Royster-Buefort said in the documentary. “The people who came there felt highbrow even if they were not.”

After Armstead died in 1954, his wife Audrey ran the club. According to WWOZ’s A Closer Walk, new owners operated a disco there during the 1970s. Vacant and damaged during Hurricane Katrina, it was demolished in 2016.

“Club Desire was a magnificent club in its heyday,” music historian Rick Coleman said in the documentary. “Even though it wasn’t used for entertainment anymore, you still knew it was a great place.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...