Place 35: The Black Spot - former site
1930The Second Interlude explicitly places the club where Memorial Park later stands, at the northern end of the old army base behind West Broadway. Exact shed position is unknown.
Photographs
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1930
Before opening time at the Black Spot, Will Hanlon polishes a glass while two Company E musicians tune up, 1930.
About The Black Spot - former site
The Black Spot was a social club created by Black servicemen at Derry’s army base in 1930. It occupied a converted outbuilding near the base’s northern end, behind West Broadway, and became the scene of one of the town’s defining episodes of racist violence. The structure did not survive. Later Memorial Park covered the same general ground, so this historical marker sits within the park rather than representing a building still visible in the 1958 or 1985 landscape.
Why this pin is marked A
Named in the novel. The street or the site is named in the text; the exact lot is the atlas’s.
Level A reflects an unusually direct historical placement: the source identifies the later Memorial Park as the ground where the Black Spot stood and connects that ground to the northern end of the old base behind West Broadway. The marker therefore has a firm neighbourhood context. Its exact position within the park remains unknown, as do the shed’s footprint, orientation and distance from the former base boundary; the point represents the documented site area, not a recovered foundation.
