The Bill Curtis Elite Club
The Bill Curtis Saloon was the headquarters for the 400 Club.
From a 1896 article in a St. Louis newspaper...
If there is anything that Morgan street dislikes it is conventionality... It scorns imitation. It is original or nothing, and has formulated an unwritten social law of its own. Is it not the home of the famous Four Hundred Social Club, and the habitat of the Hon. Bill Curtis, who runs the most extensive chance emporium in North St. Louis?
What the late Al McWardister and his followers were to Gotham the Hon. Bill Curtis and the colored 400 are to St. Louis.
Happy is this city in the fact that death has withheld its destroying hand from his headquarters and spared to us William and his cohorts. Though the Morgue and the City Hospital are regularly supplied with subjects from his headquarters, his popularity never declines, for it is generally conceded that he is acting as a public benefactor in allowing undesirable members of colored society to be dispatched in his place of business.
Not every gentleman would be so accommodating in this respect as the Hon. Bill.
Would he permit his floors to be stained with the blood of these social drones if it were not that his great heart is fairly bursting with magnanimity and unselfish zeal in the cause of good government?
We trow not.