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Storied Venue

A club where Sunday is the new Saturday

storyvillePhoto: Susan Ogan

W

ay off the wearily beaten track of Newbury Street, the Alley, and the Faneuil Hall neighborhood with its gum-chewing coeds in the rope lines, Storyville keeps a low profile, hidden as it is in a basement space on a side street underneath the Copley Square Hotel. And that’s on purpose: Employees are even sworn to secrecy about which celebs stop by. But insiders know that this sleek ultra lounge has a little-known industry night, open to anyone, that keeps it hopping Sundays, when the other clubs are dead. Storyville takes its name and vibe from a fabled jazz and blues club that operated in the hotel (and briefly in the Hotel Buckminster in Kenmore Square) in the 1950s, which attracted performers including Billy Holiday (enshrined there, above), Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Dave Brubeck, and patrons including Malcolm X when he lived in Boston and was known as Malcolm Little.

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Ghosts of Girlfriends Past with Matthew McConaughey and Michael Douglas spent eight days filming at Storyville (it was then called Saint), where (in the film) the Douglas character gets slapped by a woman he tries to pick up.