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As a Dallas-based historian whose work has recently revolved around the Deep Ellum neighborhood, I came across a business this summer that piqued my interest: Kanvas Sport + Social, a high-end sports bar and restaurant that opened in June. Of course, a new eatery isn’t uncommon in this part of town, which is known for its vibrant nightlife. But Kanvas is significant because it’s reminiscent of an age a hundred years ago, when Black-owned dining and drinking establishments thrived in the area and carried on important social traditions, from preserving certain cuisines to providing places for music to thrive.
Kanvas owner Kevin Kelley, a native Dallasite who’s an attorney by day, opened his first local restaurant, Kitchen + Kocktails by Kevin Kelley, in 2020, serving nostalgic yet elegant interpretations of fried catfish, braised oxtails, and macaroni and cheese. The success of that venture led him to think carefully about where he would open his next restaurant. “I know the history of this community,” he says of Deep Ellum. “I want others to feel proud to know that someone who looks like me can use his resources to support others. Yes, it’s a sports bar and you can eat or catch a game on TV, but it means so much more than that.” He’s hoping to inspire the creation of more thriving Black businesses in the community, businesses of the kind Deep Ellum nurtured a century ago.
The name Deep Ellum reflects the local Black vernacular of the late eighteenth century. “Ellum” was the phonetic rendering of Elm, likely the first street settled in the community, in the early 1870s. “Deep” referred to the distance from the neighborhood to the center of downtown Dallas (located to the southwest), as in “deep on Elm Street.” The neighborhood as we know it today began to find its footing shortly after the tracks of the Houston and Texas Central Railway were laid, as small, shotgun-style houses inhabited by formerly enslaved Black residents and Eastern European shopkeepers sprang up. Much of the labor on the trains was done by African Americans, who frequently worked as porters, attendants, and cooks. Such roles in servitude reflected skills honed during the most challenging of times. But African Americans also served as operational crew members, ensuring the success of the locomotive by working as brakemen and feeding the firebox with fuel.
The neighborhood grew, and Deep Ellum’s reputation as an entertainment hub for the Black community solidified in the twenties. By this time, Elm and Main, along with Central Avenue (which would later become Central Expressway), were lined with cafes selling favorite dishes, such as freshly caught catfish, and surreptitiously offering the local beverage of choice: choc beer, a home brew fermented with barley, hops, and yeast and flavored with ripe seasonal fruits such as peaches or apples. (Many families, including my own, brewed the strong elixir out of their kitchens and for profit.) Music venues and clubs also proliferated, where Texas blues legends such as Samuel “Lightnin’ ” Hopkins, a member of my lineage, played alongside jazz musicians. The electric atmosphere would have resonated deeply with migrants from New Orleans, who came to Dallas in droves during this time.
Some of the most prominent Black business owners in this golden age were the Darensbourg brothers. In 1929, musician Percy Darensbourg opened Central Tavern Inn, a place to eat, drink, hear the latest bands, and gamble, all away from the watchful eyes of the U.S. marshals who enforced Prohibition. Three years later, Percy’s brother Caffery launched Frenchie’s Creole Inn, on Boll Street. By 1935, another brother, Irving, had started the Green Tavern at 217 Central Avenue, near Percy’s bar. The brothers also opened the popular Gypsy Tea Room Cafe near today’s Central Expressway and Elm Street, walking distance from where Kanvas operates today. Percy and Caffery were talented musicians, so I assume that, as at Kelley’s Kanvas, music often billowed out of the doors and windows.
By the late thirties, a visitor to the area could find hoodoo and conjure shops juxtaposed with barbecue and fried-chicken joints. These mom-and-pop operations allowed families like the Darensbourgs to gain more control over their lives.
A Dallas Morning News article dated May 3, 1925, described the gritty streets of Elm, Main, and Central as “dangerous,” naming Deep Ellum and Little Mexico, a neighborhood located just north of downtown, as “Dangerous Beats’ of Dallas Police.” Today the neighborhood has changed considerably, yet remnants of its past still echo.
Now, during the day, the area attracts a diverse crowd, including those staying at the posh Kimpton Pittman Hotel, designed by William Sidney Pittman, Texas’s first practicing Black architect. Visitors are drawn to modern restaurants serving Texas favorites, such as Terry Black’s and Pecan Lodge, for brisket, and Revolver Taco Lounge, for Mexican dishes. While the neighborhood shows signs of gentrification—the groundwork for which was laid by redlining and other segregationist policies even before the nearby freeway construction in 1973—Deep Ellum retains its unique edge. At night, it transforms, drawing a more eclectic and predominantly Black crowd that brings the streets a bit closer to their origins. (In describing the day-to-night transformation, a 1940 publication of the Writers’ Program of the WPA in Dallas called Deep Ellum “sleepily quiet or restlessly gay.”) This mix of visitors at night contributes to the perception that Deep Ellum is still “dangerous”—a label that lingers, although the neighborhood doesn’t rank among Dallas’s top ten most dangerous.
The “sleepily quiet or restlessly gay” duality still exists today. I scroll through social media and read the posts of those who caution visitors to avoid the area at night, and I laugh because these things have been said since Deep Ellum was born. In opening Kanvas, Kelley isn’t just establishing another business—he’s reclaiming a piece of the neighborhood’s past while pushing its legacy forward.
Deah Berry Mitchell is a Dallas-based historian and food writer pursuing a doctorate in history with a focus on Black Texas foodways at the University of North Texas. She serves as the historian in residence for the City of Dallas, a board member for the National Juneteenth Museum, and a Dallas County Historical Commission member.
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