Origin story
A room built around the music.
Intimate live shows, curated by people who love them. Inside TolHouse, in Toledo’s historic Vistula District.
Will Lucas, founder, on stage at Lucille’s.
The lineage
A jazz town, then a quiet one.
The Trianon Ballroom. Waiters and Bellmen’s Club. Kin Wa Low. Rusty’s Jazz Cafe. Murphy’s Place. Toledo is the city that raised Art Tatum and Jon Hendricks, the city where Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald stopped in between Chicago and Detroit. Jazz wasn’t in college. It was in the streets.
Then Murphy’s Place closed in 2011. Degage Jazz Cafe followed in 2017. For nearly ten years after, the Glass City had no dedicated home for the music it helped shape. The sets got sporadic. The rooms went quiet.
The inspiration
From a kid at Rusty’s.
TolHouse founder Will Lucas fell into jazz as a teenager. A friend dragged him to Rusty’s Jazz Cafe. After that first night, he was a three-to-four-nights-a-week regular, listening to Leon and Damen Cook work the room.
When he built TolHouse in the old Haas-Jordan umbrella factory on North Summit Street, one room kept asking a question the building wouldn’t let him drop: where does the jazz go?
“I knew that jazz needed to be there. So, with that inspiration pulled from my early experience, we built Lucille’s with the goal of reviving that spirit. The spirit of an intimate jazz setting, local acts, and amazing performances.”
In good company
The room
Phones off. The music is the point.
Eighty seats. A proper stage. A room built to listen, not to scroll. Before each set, we ask you to put your phone away and take any conversations outside. Local musicians have told us this is the part that matters most. We agree.
The Yamaha C6 grand piano on stage is the same one Claude Black played at Rusty’s Jazz Cafe. Johnny O’Neal and Larry Fuller have sat down at it here. A piece of Toledo jazz history, still in service.
The programming
Jazz first. But not only jazz.
The calendar leads with jazz because that’s where the room’s heart is. But we book soul, folk, blues, and whatever else we think Toledo should hear, too. Curated, not streamed. Every artist on the schedule is someone we personally wanted in the room.
There are roughly twenty full-time jazz clubs left in America. Lucille’s is one of them. We take that seriously.
Find us
Inside TolHouse.
Lucille’s lives in the public space at TolHouse, the social club carved out of the old Haas-Jordan umbrella factory at 1447 N. Summit St. TolHouse is private. Lucille’s is open to everyone with a ticket.
1447 N. Summit St.Toledo, OH 43604
Historic Vistula District