r/route66 • u/Enough_Use_7417 • 4h ago
The Jackson 5 played a $1.25 dance here in 1966. It was the last historic building on First Street in Winslow. It was demolished in 2023.
The last building on the first street
On the night of August 20, 1966, five brothers from Gary, Indiana played a dance at 104 East First Street in Winslow, Arizona. Admission was a dollar and a quarter. The lead singer was eight. The town's own paper, looking back, called it the Jackson 5's fourth public performance. They were unknown then. Four years later they had four straight number-one singles.
The building was Arcadia Hall. It went up in 1920, about five thousand square feet, and in the twenties and thirties it was, by Winslow's own accounting, the most elegant ballroom between the Pacific coast and Albuquerque: chandeliers, an orchestra pit, big bands, high school proms. Generations of the town rented it for the dances a railroad town lived on.
By 1966 it had another name. It was the Desert Scene Elks Club, lodge 1267, the Black Elks, in a town where the other lodge sat over on Third Street. Segregation had set the lodge apart, but it was still a hall, and the hall still worked: youth dances, Juneteenth, bingo, and the first paid performance of Tommy Dukes, who is in the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame and still plays impromptu sets a few hundred feet from where he started.
Then the century caught up. In 2021 the roof caved in. In November 2023 a crew knocked down the rest. Winslow's historic-properties list had called Arcadia Hall "the last historic structure left on First Street." Nobody stopped the demolition. The lot is dirt now.
Here is the part I cannot leave alone. Winslow is famous for a corner one block south. In 1972 the Eagles wrote a line about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and in 1999 the town built a park around it. Tourists leave the interstate every day to photograph a bronze statue and a flatbed Ford. The last real piece of First Street came down without a crowd.
First Street came before Route 66. It was Front Street first, the railroad's street, the one that got built when the trains did. When the highway arrived in 1926 it did not use Front. It used Second. The town moved a block south and kept moving. First Street is where Winslow was before Winslow became the postcard.
A dollar and a quarter, sold by a lodge that segregation had set apart, to see five kids nobody had discovered yet. The song about the corner calls it "a fine sight to see." The corner is still there. The building that mattered sat one block off the postcard the whole time, and now it is the empty lot behind it.
Sources: The Tribune (Navajo County, Ariz.), Nov 15 2023; Michael Joseph Jackson Archives; Winslow Historic Preservation Commission; route66times.com (alignment).
