Detroit’s members-only Carbon Athletic Club is opening to the public with live music

Tucked among the train tracks in an industrial section of Southwest Detroit, the old Carbon Athletic Club has been called “Delray’s best-kept secret” by Metro Times and remains in many ways a time capsule of 1947, the year it opened as a hangout for the community’s Hungarian and Polish immigrants. Much of its former neighborhood no longer exists.

But if the humble bar is going to continue to defy the ravages of time, it needs new blood. Fortunately, a new generation of members are breathing life into the club.

MaryBeth Beaudry, the club’s newly elected president (it uses a special liquor license reserved for nonprofit organizations, which require an elected board), sees her job as “bridging the old with the new.” To that end, she’s aiming to expand membership by opening the doors to the public for live music events, which she expects to ramp up in 2024.

The Carbon-curious can check out the club at a country music concert on Tuesday, April 16 featuring Austin, Texas troubadour Cactus Lee with support from Big Spirit, E.M. Allen, Nancy Friday, and Ash Nowak, a new C.A.C. member who will spin records between sets and is helping to organize the show.

Tickets are available at the door, cash only, and capacity is limited at around 100 or so.

“It’s always been this really delicate spot of preserving the history, which our older members would like to continue to do, but also bringing in more exposure, more people who have a skill set that they can help the club with,” Beaudry explains. “Because it’s always just been run by the hands of a few.”

The club is entirely volunteer-operated, with members working the bar, cleaning the facilities, and scrounging together the resources to make any renovations or repairs.

Beaudry, who has worked in Detroit’s bar and restaurant industry since she was a teenager, says she was instantly charmed by the old club when a member brought her along years ago. The club hosts an annual Christmas party to watch the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train pass by, a locomotive decked out in festive lights that travels North America.

“They had a big party, and the Detroit Party Marching marching band was outside, it was just a really cool vibe,” Beaudry says. “And then that night, I signed up for membership.”

As a newly minted member, Beaudry returned one day to find the bartender that night explaining that the other member scheduled to work that day did not show up. “She was like, ‘Do you want a couple days a week? I would love to have you,’” Beaudry recalls. Soon, she was regularly slinging drinks and also working to bring the club into the 21st century with a social media presence and an email list, as well as booking more events.

“The main events they had were like steak roasts, and fish fries, and a corned beef dinner for Saint Patrick’s Day,” Beaudry says.

Beaudry says the club’s heyday was fueled by workers from nearby industrial plants. “There was an older crowd,” she says. “You know, they used to have a really big business with the auto companies and with all the industry nearby, they would come over for lunch.”

Over the decades, once-popular social clubs in the U.S. have also declined, so the younger members of C.A.C. have had a bit of a learning curve.

“For a lot of us, it is foreign,” she says. “Robert’s Rules of Order, we’re all researching those now. Like, how do we run this meeting, besides, you know, doing the Pledge of Allegiance?”

Memberships cost $30 a year, and $50 the first year with an existing member’s co-sign. Beaudry says members get discounted tickets to events (“For the old timers that have always sat at the bar any day of the week, we don’t charge them anything,” she adds) and is working on a plan to offer a rebate to members who volunteer their time to help run the club.

Beer prices are low, with most sold for $1.50-$2.25.

Nowak, one half of the duo behind the Haute to Death dance night, says she’s working on organizing events there that will appeal to both the older and newer members of the club.

“I’m trying to be really cognizant of [running events] where everyone that is a regular there can enjoy it,” she says, adding, “I wouldn’t throw a Haute to Death there, they would kill me!”

Beaudry believes no-frills spots like the Carbon Athletic Club will always have their place.

“Especially in Detroit right now, I mean, there’s so much competition in terms of where to go,” she says. “Everybody’s doing nice cocktails. But everybody, I think, deep down loves a grandpa bar. I always joke that I love going to Donovan’s [another Southwest Detroit dive] because on a Tuesday or Wednesday I can go there to cry if I wanted to, or I can go play euchre at the end of the bar with the bartender. I think people enjoy that. And there aren’t enough of those.”

She adds, “I think Carbon is unique in its appeal because it’s in the middle of nowhere. … It’s a place that people feel is a secret little corner in the armpit of Detroit [and] it’s really near and dear to my heart.”