Arts & Culture
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The Coliseum Ballroom on Route 66 in Benld was a lively Saturday night destination with the biggest dance floor between Chicago and St. Louis, drawing people from across the region to dance to big bands such as Duke Ellington, Lawrence Welk, and Tommy Dorsey and to rock to Ray Charles, Fats Domino, and the Everly Brothers. Benld, named after town founder Ben L. Dorsey, was known as a little Las Vegas when Dominic Tarro built the Coliseum in the 1920s, as miners gambled at taverns and moonshine flowed from "Mine No. 5," a disguised still. After its musical heyday, the Coliseum housed an antique mall for several years before the ballroom burned to the ground in a 2011 electrical fire.
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Benld, Illinois · United States
