The list of musicians sounds improbable for a neighborhood venue: Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, James Brown, Ike & Tina Turner, to name just a few. Yet, over the decades, they all performed at the Sunset Lounge in West Palm Beach.
Built in 1926 by Robert Saunders, a local businessman, as an auto service station with an open rooftop garden and grill, the building evolved into a two-story lounge. The second floor was eventually enclosed under a barreled roof, creating a dance floor below and a mezzanine above, where patrons gathered to watch the acts perform. After Saunders was shot and killed inside the venue by a disgruntled employee, Dennis and Thelma Starks took over the lounge and led it into its heyday.
The Sunset Lounge’s popularity was closely connected to the history of segregation in the South. In Palm Beach County, during the Jim Crow era, Black residents were largely confined to a designated area just northwest of downtown that became known as the Historic Northwest neighborhood. Despite these restrictions, the Historic Northwest developed into a thriving ecosystem of businesses. It had its own doctors, lawyers, dry cleaners, schools, churches, and local shops, and within the boundaries of segregation, residents built a self-sufficient community.
By the 1940s and ’50s, the Sunset Lounge became one of the most celebrated stops on the Chitlin’ Circuit, the network of venues stretching from New York to Miami where Black entertainers could safely perform. (The circuit’s name came from chitterlings, a popular Southern dish made from pig intestines.) On some nights, the lounge drew up to 1,000 guests dressed in evening gowns and tuxedos to a full dance floor.
For many residents, it was more than a nightclub. As Ike Robinson, former city commissioner of West Palm Beach, told Boca magazine in 2021, “I have been in West Palm Beach since 1962, and that was the only place that persons of my ethnicity were allowed. We couldn’t go to The Breakers. We couldn’t go to Bradley’s. We couldn’t go to the Everglades Club.” Robinson adds, “The Sunset provided for the community to come together, intermingle, socialize and learn. I’m talking about the bougies, the potentates, the workingman, the people who serve the people in Palm Beach.”
When legal segregation ended in the 1960s, the neighborhood began to change. Families moved to other parts of the county as new housing and school opportunities opened. As Dr. Alisha Winn, an applied cultural anthropologist, founder of Consider the Culture, and a Palm Beach County native explains, the shift disrupted the cohesion of the Historic Northwest community and contributed over time to a loss of generational wealth and homeownership. The Sunset Lounge lost its luster and eventually shuttered in 2018.
Thanks to the West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), a public entity that revitalizes blighted areas through public investment and redevelopment projects, the Sunset Lounge reopened in November. The venue now includes a restaurant and bar, rooftop lounge, and event space. The names that once passed through its doors are legendary. Standing on their shoulders, the next chapter of the Sunset Lounge’s story has begun, written by the musicians who take its stage and the people who carry its legacy forward.
