Though she once lived within sight of southeast Gainesville's Cotton Club, Vivian Filer never went inside.
The club hosted music greats such as B.B. King and James Brown, but Filer, 70, doesn't remember the visits they made when she was about 12 years old.
"I never got to go in the nightclub," she said. "Good girls don't do that."
But these days, she visits the Cotton Club often as chairwoman of the board of directors working to restore the old building into a neighborhood community center.
Project leaders opened up the property, at Southeast Seventh Avenue, on Saturday evening, offering tours of the building, live music, and fried fish and corn on the cob as part of a fund raiser that collected about $1,100.
They have hosted fish fries before, said Donna Isaacs, the project manager, as well as a Juneteenth Festival and Juried Art Show that drew 5,000 people last year. Another fund raiser is planned at the Florida Museum of Natural History for April 24.
The main building should cost about $800,000 to restore, Isaacs said. The entire property, which also contains four small wooden houses and an old grocery store, could require $1.5 million to $2 million.
"This was truly a little community," Isaacs said.
Residents who lived in the houses were nearby a church, entertainment and shopping, she said.
The Cotton Club building, the focal point of the community, opened as the Perry Theater in the 1940s.
Around 1950, it became a nightclub, named after the famous Cotton Club in Harlem in New York City, where well-known black performers entertained white-only audiences.
In Gainesville, though, the Cotton Club catered mostly to black audiences. As part of the travel circuit for black performers in the early 1950s, the club booked dance bands and singers such as Ray Charles, Bo Diddley and Brook Benton, drawing crowds from Ocala and Jacksonville.
It's uncertain why the club closed about two years later. Filer said UF students from the North, who were not accustomed to Southern segregation, started to attend shows and raised the ire of city officials.
The club shut down and reopened as the Blue Note until the late 1950s, when it became a furniture warehouse until 1970.
Filer said the property was purchased in the mid-1990s by Mt. Olive A.M.E. Church next door to the property. A board of directors decided it could best benefit the neighborhood as a museum and cultural center.
Isaacs, interested in combining historical preservation with environmentally friendly building techniques, joined the project several years later. Construction picked up in April 2004, when the project received a $350,000 grant, she said.
Since then, workers have elevated the building and repaired its foundations, and plan to start soon on the roof. The main building could be completed by June 2009, Isaacs said.
In addition, the project has received a $100,000 grant from Gainesville's Community Redevelopment Agency to convert the grocery store into an outdoor cafe, she said. One of the houses, where Isaacs keeps an office, has already been completed.
Volunteers, as well as Alachua County work crews sentenced to community service, clean bricks and remove nails from old boards every week, she said. But the entire neighborhood has been involved in the project.
Otis Stover, a member of the board of directors, said his family has owned property in the neighborhood since 1900. Though he wasn't old enough to go to the Cotton Club, Stover said his mother sold tickets when the building was a movie theater, and he often played on the property when it included the warehouse.
"It was the perfect project to bring my neighborhood back to life," Stover said. "Of course I was going to be a part of that."
Philip Surles, a UF doctoral student, got involved in the project as a master's degree student in 2003.
"It's really interesting to see how the future is imagined by drawing on the past," Surles said. "It was kind of interesting to see them use the physical transformation of the Cotton Club as community rejuvenation."
Others have also showed interest in the project, Isaacs said.
Students at nearby Joseph Williams Elementary School have used the project to make a documentary on segregation.
Stephanie Evans, a UF women's studies and African-American studies professor, is mentioning the club in a book she is writing on the history of jazz in Florida.
"When you see construction going on, students getting involved; books being written, events being planned, this is absolutely the most rewarding time," Isaacs said.
Isaacs said she hopes the project can span generations. As the neighborhood ages, she said, older people sit home alone, while children come home from school to empty houses.
"What if both of those came to the Cotton Club?" she said. "That's what I hope this will be, a place where everyone comes together."
