The Music Box was located at 246 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis (next to the Nicollet Hotel).

An undated and unsigned memo (probably from the mid 1940s) says that the owner of record was the Nicollet Hotel but suspects that gangster Tommy Banks may have held the deed.

The holder of the liquor license was apparently Henry Berenson of the Minnesotan Hotel. (Minneapolis Tribune, September 7, 1949)

Matchbook images above and below courtesy Mark Youngblood

---

 

Stebbins: “During most of its existence from 1943 or 1944 to some time in the late 1940s it featured the same trio, the Mel Arvin band. In 1948 it also featured red hot Gypsy Edwards, Mel Arvin’s wife.

 

In 1944 the Art Van Damme Trio also worked there.

---

 

FIRE

The building burned to the ground in a four-alarm fire on December 25, 1948.  The story can be told in the captions of the pictures in the Minneapolis Tribune on December 26, 1948:

This is what the corner of Nicollet Avenue and Third Street looked like Saturday afternoon after firemen had checked the $500,000 four-alarm blaze.  The fire broke out at 5 am in the Music Box bar, 246 Nicollet.  Only a favorable wind prevented the flames from seriously damaging the Nicollet hotel…  The icicle-covered building also houses the Wesley Trunk Co., Nicollet Bar B-Q, Nicollet Men’s shop, three dental offices and Chicago Dental laboratories.

Icicles Form Gruesome Winter Scene – Water from firemen’s hoses froze almost as fast as it spurted into the air in the six-below-zero temperature.  Store fronts along Nicollet Avenue between the Nicollet Hotel and Third Street were hung with icicles.  Firemen threw a tarpaulin over a parked car to safeguard it from water damage.

The tons of water poured on the flames at the Music Box bar Saturday morning tore down a half-block of Christmas decorations on Nicollet Avenue.   Water from 22 fire trucks flooded the street and froze into a solid mass.

 

After the fire was put out, ice was holding up one of the walls, and it was ordered torn down for public safety for fear of falling on someone.

 

 

The location became a parking lot for the adjacent Nicollet Hotel.  The liquor and other licenses were transferred from Henry Berenson to his nephew, Louis D. Berenson, to run the former Cedar Ave. Bar, 408 Cedar Ave., which had lost its license for illegal activities.  That bar on Cedar then became known as the Music Box Bar.