The Gypsy Tea Room, Central Avenue, and The Darensbourg Brothers
by Paula Bosse
The 200 block of Central Ave., about 1937… (Dallas Public Library photo)
by Paula Bosse
I’ve seen this photograph of Deep Ellum for years, and I’ve always loved it. But for some reason, I always thought this showed Elm Street — across from the Knights of Pythias Temple, just west of Good-Latimer (probably because that’s where a recent club with the same name was located). In fact, this scene was captured a couple of blocks west, just north of Elm, on Central Avenue, sometimes referred to as Central Track, along the Houston & Texas Central railroad tracks — a part of Deep Ellum that’s been gone for more than 60 years.
After Central Expwy. replaced Central Ave. (1952 Mapsco)
This area — which many have described as being the very heart of Deep Ellum in the 1920s through the 1940s (and which was somewhat ironically referred to as “the gay white way of the Negro in Dallas” by an uncredited WPA writer) — was demolished to make way for the construction of North Central Expressway (which closely followed the H&TC Railway tracks). This photo was taken in the 200 block of North Central Avenue, looking south toward Elm (the building farthest in the background, jutting out to the left, is across Elm, on the south side of the street). To the immediate left of this photo (out of frame) was the old union depot (read about it here).
You can see that the Sanborn map from 1921 shows that same building jutting out. (See the full Sanborn map here; it might be more helpful to see this detail rotated to show the same view as the photo, here.)
1921 Sanborn map, detail (click for larger image)
Information about The Gypsy Tea Room is scant. The proprietor was a man named Irvin Darensbourg, whose family was from the black community of Killona, Louisiana in St. Charles Parish; they appear to have been of French Creole extraction, and the family’s last name was probably correctly spelled as D’Arensbourg.
The Darensbourgs were an interesting family (and not just because their mother’s maiden name was Louise Jupiter!). There were several children, and at least two of them were professional musicians: Percy Darensbourg (1899-1950) and Caffery (often spelled “Caffrey”) Darensbourg (1901-1940). Both played with several jazz bands, and Percy even made a few recordings, playing banjo. Below are a couple of promotional photos showing them at work in the 1920s, when they were still based in New Orleans, before they settled in Dallas. (These are cropped details — click pictures to see the full photos.)
Percy Darensbourg, with Lee Collins‘ band, 1925 or 1926:
Listen to Percy on banjo, here:
And, below, Caffery Darensbourg, with Manuel Perez’s Garden of Joy Orchestra (click photo to see full band — the other band members are identified here):
The first of the brothers to arrive in Dallas from New Orleans was Percy, in about 1929, and for the next few years he continued to make his living as a professional musician. Caffery followed in 1932 and opened the short-lived Frenchie’s Creole Inn on Boll Street. Their non-musician brother Irvin was here by 1935 and promptly opened the Green Tavern at 217 Central Avenue, just a few doors down from Percy’s drinking establishment, the Central Tavern Inn, at 223 Central. At about this same time, Percy was also running a club at 3120 Thomas called The Gay Paree — which The Dallas Morning News described as a “swanky negro night club” (April 12, 1938) in a short mention of Percy’s being fined for selling alcohol to an already-inebriated customer.
But back to that 200 block of Central Avenue — the one pictured in the photo at the top. Between 1937 and 1939, Irvin also owned/ran a small restaurant or cafe — and later a pool hall — out of 219½ Central. The Darensbourgs had that block locked up.
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In 1935, a song called “In a Little Gypsy Tea Room” by Bob Crosby swept the country. It was a huge hit. Suddenly there were scads of places popping up all over calling themselves The Gypsy Tea Room or The Little Gypsy Tea Room. Some might have been actual tearooms, but there were also a lot of clubs and bars with the “tea room” name — the most famous of these was The Gypsy Tea Room in the Tremé district of New Orleans, at Villere & St. Ann, which opened the same year the song was being played incessantly by every dance band in the nation. This famous New Orleans nightclub booked the biggest jazz bands around and was a legendary musician’s hangout.
New Orleans’ Gypsy Tea Room, 1942 (via Tulane University)
New Orleans’ Gypsy Tea Room, 1930s (via MyNewOrleans.com)
The Darensbourgs most likely knew the club, its owner, its patrons, and the musicians who played there. Perhaps Irvin Darensbourg decided to name his own little Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas in honor of the New Orleans landmark. Whatever the case, Deep Ellum’s Gypsy Tea Room appears to have come and gone fairly quickly (and one assumes there was more than tea being sipped inside).
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The life of a tavern and club operator could be a hard one, especially in those days, especially in the black neighborhoods of Deep Ellum and North Dallas. Irvin seemed to be forever sleeping on a relative’s couch and had a different address every few months. By 1940 he had moved to Fort Worth to open another bar, and after that … I’m not sure what became of him — but one hopes that he met a less violent end than his brothers did here in Dallas. According to Caffery’s death certificate, he died in 1940 after having been shot in the abdomen while “in a public place.” His death was ruled a homicide. Percy, who by all indications was the most stable and successful of the brothers, was also killed — in 1950 he was stabbed in the neck (!) while out on the street at 4:20 AM.
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As for the original photograph, I’ve pored over it and looked through directories, but I can’t pinpoint the exact year this photo was taken or determine what the actual address of the Gypsy Tea Room was. Since it was mentioned in the WPA Dallas Guide and History, which was written and compiled between 1936 and 1940 and contains the only contemporary mention of the Tea Room, my guess is that this photograph was taken about 1937, as this was the last year that Old Tom’s Tavern (209 ½ Central) seems to have been in business (although the bar that replaced it was owned by the same person, and the sign seen in this photograph could well have remained up for a while).
Craig’s Cafe, at 213 Central, was in business between 1929 and at least 1946 when property began to be demolished in order to begin construction on the expressway. The Gypsy Tea Room looks to be either two or three doors down from Craig’s place. My guess is that it’s 219 Central. The 1937 street directory has Irvin Darensbourg (whose name is constantly mangled and misspelled everywhere) listed as being the proprietor of both the Green Tavern (at 217 Central) as well as an unnamed restaurant at 219-A (sometimes written as 219 ½) Central. The 1938 and 1939 directories specify Darensbourg’s business at this address in those years is a pool hall, not a restaurant. So I’m going to venture that Irvin Darensbourg ran the Gypsy Tea Room at 219 Central Avenue in 1937.
That was exhausting!
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Sources & Notes
Photo of the Gypsy Tea Room at the top of this post is from the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library: “Gypsy Tea Room Cafe located in Deep Ellum” is from the WPA Dallas Guide & History Collection of the Dallas Public Library — its call number is PA85-16/22.
Thanks to Bob Dunn of the Lone Star Library Annex for deciphering “Darensbourg” from this badly garbled printed name on the Gypsy Tea Room sign.
Here are a few of the numerous ways this Darensbourg’s family’s name is misspelled across the internet:
D’Arensbourg
Darensbourg
Darensburg
Darenbourg
Darenburg
Darnburg
Darnsberg
Dansberg
Darensborough
And I’m still not actually sure whether it’s “Irvin” or “Irving,” or “Caffery” or “Caffrey.”
When clicked, the photo of Percy Darensbourg above opens up to show the full band — the personnel is identified in a caption from the book Oh, Didn’t He Ramble: The Life Story of Lee Collins: “Lee’s band in Dallas, 1925 or 1926. From the left: Coke Eye Bob (Arthur Joseph?), Mary Brown, Freddie ‘Boo-Boo’ Miller, Octave Crosby, Henry Julien, ‘Professor’ Sherman Cook, Lee, and Percy Darensburg [sic].”
A couple of other versions of “In a Little Gypsy Tea Room,” if you must:
- The version by The Light Crust Doughboys (no strangers to Deep Ellum), recorded in 1935 in Dallas at 508 Park, is here.
- The at-least-peppier version by Louis Prima and His New Orleans Gang, also recorded in 1935, is here.
See what the area once occupied by the vibrant street life of Central Track looks like now, here. The expressway overpass is now planted about where the photo was taken. It’s a shame this important part of town — in a way it was Dallas’ second downtown — was bulldozed into oblivion.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
As both a writer and musician, this story holds a special meaning for me. Growing up in Dallas, Deep Ellum was a place we were warned about. Most bus transfers for us were made at its edge and despite our Sunday schooling we loved to stroll through Honest Joe’s and down deeper into the taverns and domino parlors. We never ran into trouble down there, that came later showing up at home late. Paula you are very talented and your research is amazing. Thanks
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Thank you, Smokey. I grew up never hearing about Deep Ellum until its resurgence in the ’80s. When I discovered it I loved it. It felt so different from any other part of the city. Even then – before I knew much about its history – I felt the sort of sadness you feel when you walk down the streets of a ghost town and wonder what happened to all the people who used to live there. I wish I’d been around when the place was alive and electric. Sometimes I feel that Deep Ellum is the only real historic part of Dallas that remains and has somehow (mostly) escaped this city’s weird and relentless zeal for everything to be new and shiny and historically empty. When I think about how much of it we’ve already lost, it makes me crazy.
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I wish State – Thomas could have survived, once this old Freedman’s Town dried up and it’s old families moved on (many to Hamilton Park), no one seemed to care. Although a little north of The Track, it was within walking distance. Theater, cafes, professional services, and even a nice hotel for folks, segregated or just serving the needs of the locals?
Thanks again Paula!
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I would trade State-Thomas for “Uptown” in a heartbeat.
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Dallas has done a terrible job of preserving it’s history. Developers have little room for the past in what they call progress. What happens when we saw the rungs from the ladder below us, how are we ever to progress.?
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The building “jutting out” in the picture was, in the early 1950s, a cafe that appeared to specialize in fried fish sandwiches. Perhaps they had trout sandwiches too? At any rate the sidewalk in front of that address and just across the tracks, also on the south side of Elm was, as I understand it, the locale in which Blind Lemon Jefferson may have put on some of his impromptu performances at a slightly earlier date. Funny that 1925 seemed as remote to me in 1952 as it does now.
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[…] “The Gypsy Tea Room, Central Avenue, and The Darensbourg Brothers.” A photo I used only a detail of (showing only Percy Darensbourg — at the right on banjo), but this is the full photo, showing Lee Collins’ band in Dallas in 1925 or 1926. Fantastic photo of musicians who would have played clubs in the South, including stops in Deep Ellum and North Dallas. […]
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[…] It’s interesting to note that during the heyday of the Union Depot, the west side of the block of Central Ave. that ran between Elm and Pacific was the only block in this area not filled with black-owned businesses or residences. When the depot shut down and white-owned businesses moved out, the block began to fill with popular African-American establishments. It’s also interesting (to me, anyway!) to realize that the Gypsy Tea Room of the 1930s was just a few steps to the left of the hotel in the top photo. It took me forever to try to figure out where the Gypsy Tea Room had been — I wrote about it here. […]
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[…] “The Gypsy Tea Room, Central Avenue, and The Darensbourg Brothers,” here […]
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Thank you for all the investigative research! I was part of the Deep Ellum Community between 1995 and 2000. So I used to go the new Gypsy Tea Room quite a bit. I engaged in poetry eventually working and practically running Deep Java until it closed in 1997. I played show at many clubs, cafes & bars on those streets. I taught different swing dances at Sons of Hermann Hall, The Jet Lounge & a club called something like the Red Velvet that I didn’t know well on Elm. I had a 9-piece swing band that played at the Jet Lounge. After the swing clubs closed I worked at my dear friends Vintage Store Casa Loco II. Those 5 years where packed with fast excitement.
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Thanks, Aaron!
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I want to know how can I find out the name of a meat company that was on Lamar st right next to the freeway it is now a scrap metal yard. The meat company was there in the early 80’s?
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[…] Remembered most fondly for its days as the Gypsy Ballroom and the Gypsy Tea Room (itself named for a club destroyed still earlier in the neighborhood’s history), in more recent years the venue operated as The Door and, finally, […]
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Great history and maps.
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[…] Darensbourg bersaudara adalah keluarga besar dan berbakat yang menjadikan Dallas dan Fort Worth sebagai rumah mereka, dan […]
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[…] of my happiest Flashback Dallas research deep-dives resulted in the post “The Gypsy Tea Room, Central Avenue, and The Darensbourg Brothers.” It was prompted by a photo I had seen for years but had never really known what it showed. I loved […]
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