[Dixielandjazz] Harlem's Jitterbug Days

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - LONG and only a few references to OKOM and OKOM musicians, a filler
for a slow Sunday.

BUT WAIT, If you like the historical approach to the positive music, you may
find this article interesting.

Very interesting to me because I was born on 155th Street in Harlem my
parents having been living there since 1927 in what was then a still
fashionable Italian neighborhood. And also interesting to me because I met
Adam Clayton Powell Jr (prominently mentioned in the article) after he was
indicted by the Feds for income tax evasion circa late 1950s.

He was being defended by Edward Bennett Williams and Vincent Fuller both
brilliant criminal defense attorneys. At the time, my criminal law professor
was Roy Cohn, (yes, that Roy Cohn of the Army-McCarthy hearings) who was a
friend of EBW. And I also had a class mate who was a personal friend of
Powell's. Together, we spent time at the Federal District court in Manhattan
watching EBW make monkeys out of the prosecuting attorneys. Powell was
acquitted via a hung jury and subsequently re elected in Harlem. Then the US
Congress refused to seat him, but he won that battle too. His only election
loss came shortly before he died, circa 1970.

At the time, I was also gigging 4 nights a week around various NYC jazz
nightclubs, and both Powell with his ladies and Cohn with his men would
occasionally fall by. Oh my, those were some days/nights. :-) VBG.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Jitterbug Days 

By KEVIN BAKER
Published: January 22, 2006

THE first thing you notice about Harlem is how wide the sky is. For a
longtime New Yorker, so accustomed to being blinkered by ever more towers,
the views along Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards are almost
giddying. To the south, it feels as if you can see the rest of Manhattan
below you, or at least down to the skyscrapers of Midtown, set like so many
pickets against the horizon. Those structures offer a different tone poem
every day, depending on the weather and the time of year; spectacular
beneath the gaudy sunset of a summer evening, moody and contemplative on a
drizzly winter afternoon.

The view is one of the few strands that tie the Harlem of today to what it
was 60 years ago, and it is very welcome. When writing about the city as it
was, one searches for any visual clue, however fleeting, to what people were
seeing, feeling and hearing back then as they went about their daily lives.

Such moments are not easily forthcoming. New York is a wastrel with its
past, shucking its skin like some giant snake as it slithers relentlessly
into the future. Some of this is inevitable, of course, if a city is not to
become a mausoleum, and the past is not something to be idealized. And yet
it is easy to wish that what existed before had not been eradicated quite so
quickly, or so thoroughly. That is certainly the case with the Harlem of the
1940's.

This nostalgia is ironic, because Harlem is a fluke. Those grand avenues
give away what the neighborhood was intended to be, a hundred years ago: a
wealthy, white suburb for the city growing explosively just to the south.
But because of a combination of overspeculation, racism and pure chance,
Harlem became something very different, the capital of black America, the
locus of countless dreams - and a prison of sorts.

The swampy village that was Harlem had been intended as a home for the white
elite, who had been retreating up Manhattan before one immigrant wave after
another for most of the 19th century. Moving up the island almost
simultaneously were New York's African-Americans, living together as a
segregated community since the terrible lynchings of the Civil War draft
riots. They were pushed on from one neighborhood to the next by assaults
from the police, and by the same, white ethnic hordes that so frightened the
nobs.

Deprived of their anticipated upper class, the landlords of Harlem turned to
black tenants, knowing they could be charged double the standard rents for
working-class New Yorkers because they had no place else to go. The result
was New York's first real ghetto.

The word, ghetto, has come to be used almost interchangeably with slum, but
it means something else. Where a slum implies simply poverty, a ghetto is a
place where everyone, from all walks of life, rich or poor, is relegated by
virtue of race or religion. By the 1920's, the convergence of blacks from
every walk of life and region had brought about the Harlem Renaissance, the
first great concentrated flowering of black culture in America. The
Depression was hard on Harlem, and it ended the renaissance. Yet by 1943
Harlem was enjoying an edgy resurgence, infused with the new money generated
by the war.

THIS was the last moment when Harlem was still a destination, an
irresistible attraction for black and white servicemen alike who were on
leave. Both the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm Little, later
Malcolm X, were walking those broad avenues then, and they would scarcely
recognize the Harlem of today.

Like the rest of Manhattan, it is an almost sedate place now. Much of the
exuberant street life is gone, the vendors no longer hawking everything from
ice to coal to sweet potatoes, with songs made up and sung to tunes from the
hit parade. There are no more numbers runners, catching the nickels that
slipped like quicksilver through the fire escape slits above; no more
"Thursday girls," who strode out for a night on the town from beauty shops
that were filled with smoke from the various, frightening hair-straightening
processes of the day.

The Harlem of World War II was a vibrant place, a place well-honed by both
disappointment and hope, where the music was harder and better than ever,
where some of the best musicians who ever were competed against each other
in midnight parties to raise rent money for the host. The music was best
there, in those overcrowded, ordinary apartments, played by men who would
never leave their best stuff in the downtown clubs.

Physically, most of Harlem is still built on a very human scale, and still
has one of the city's largest collections of brownstones. Some of the old
institutions remain from that time as well: the magnificently ponderous
Y.M.C.A. on 135th Street, where Malcolm and so many other eager newcomers
lived, and the stately Hotel Theresa, where more celebrated visitors stayed,
from Joe Louis to Fidel Castro.

Yet the Harlem night scene has almost vanished, gone the way of the city's
other fantastic entertainment districts, from the Latin Quarter to the old
Coney Island to the German beer gardens that once lined the Bowery. The
enormous dance halls, where the big bands played and jitterbugging came into
its own, are long gone. The Cotton Club moved to Midtown before the 30's
were out, and the fabulous Savoy Ballroom - "the home of happy feet," with
its battles of the bands and its 250-foot-long dance floor - has been
replaced by a housing project and a few stores.

The only physical remnant of the great halls is the gorgeous ruin of the
Renaissance Casino, a hall that was big enough to hold one of New York's
first great basketball teams, the New York Rens. It still runs the length of
a city block on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and is somehow still
majestic despite the layers of grime on its red-brick facade, the trees
growing out of its roof, and its rusting marquees, one of them incongruously
advertising "Chow Mein."

The great clubs are gone, too. Connie's Inn, where Louis Armstrong and Fats
Waller played, has been replaced by something that looks like a garage.
Small's Paradise, which had the best floor shows and, some say, the only
working air-conditioning in Harlem, and where Malcolm met all the hustlers
and pimps and burglars he would write about so lovingly in his
autobiography, has now been subsumed by a school and an International House
of Pancakes. 

The old live theaters and the great movie palaces, the Lafayette, the
Alhambra and the Victoria, have been plowed under as well, or changed beyond
recognition. The Regent, considered the first truly "deluxe" movie theater
in Manhattan, has long since been converted into a church.

Gone, too, are the less respectable establishments. The stretch of 133rd
Street between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards was then
known as Beale Street or Jungle Alley; this block of raucous clubs and
after-hours bars was described rather melodramatically at the time as a
place where "a knife blade is the quick arbiter of all quarrels, where
prostitutes take anything they can get." Now it is a quiet block full of
brownstone churches, and workmen rehabilitating brick town houses. West
144th Street, where a teenage Malcolm once worked as a "john-walker,"
escorting white tricks up to see black prostitutes, seems even more
somnolent. 

About all that remains of Harlem, the entertainment mecca, is the elegant
Apollo. One can still stand on 126th Street and study the long, fire escape
staircases on its back, wondering which one might have been used as a
separate entrance for black patrons, confined to an upper gallery when the
building was still the segregated Hurtig & Seamon's theater.

To the west of the Apollo stood the old Braddock Hotel, now demolished. For
a while, it was the place leading black entertainers would stay, and in the
40's the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday could still be found in
its bar - close enough so they could step over from the stage door of the
Apollo for a quick drink. But by World War II, the hotel itself had become
seedy. The race riot of 1943, the worst in Harlem's history, which would
leave six people dead and the neighborhood ravaged, would begin there when a
black serviceman was shot by a white cop in a fight that started over a
complaint about a room.

Across 125th Street from the Apollo is the site of other battles. The old
Kress's department store, where an earlier, more contained race riot began
in 1935 after the false rumor that a shoplifter had been killed by store
detectives, has been altered irretrievably. But the facade and name of a
defunct department store just down the street, Blumstein's, is still in
place. This was among the last great bastions of segregation in Harlem; the
store had refused to hire black employees or even to allow black women to
try on dresses. It was finally conquered by the "don't shop where you can't
work" campaigns of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Those initiatives were a dramatic first step for Mr. Powell, who, while
still holding the pulpit he had inherited from his father at the Abyssinian
Baptist Church, went on to become the city's first black councilman, then
its first black congressman. It was not surprising that the first black man
to represent Harlem in Congress was a clergyman; no part of the old Harlem
has survived as intact as its many, splendid churches. They stand like
fortresses along its streets, as many of them have for the last 80 or even
90 years: the Abyssinian and St. Philip's, Salem Methodist and Mount Olivet,
Mount Calvary and St. Mark's, to name only a few.

The great churches have never been the be-all and end-all of religion in
Harlem; the area has many humble storefront churches, and many cultists and
revivalists. But the big churches played a special role. These were the
"invisible institution" made manifest - the term dating to the days of
slavery, referring to how black believers had often had to hide their
services. 

Over the decades these entities, some of them dating to Lower Manhattan in
the late 1700's, had been painfully brought to life. They had been kept
together as their communicants moved up the West Side of Manhattan,
transferred to private homes, abandoned buildings, even old stables. Critics
argued that these great structures were too heavy a burden on the community,
but to finally establish large, impressive churches was to make a statement,
to say that Harlem was where they would make a stand.

Mr. Powell, a determined democratizer, relentlessly mocked his fellow
clerics, accusing them of hypocrisy and "churchianity," and ridiculing all
pretensions on the basis of income, or background, or skin tone. His
needling fell largely on deaf ears. Distinctions are always made within the
ghetto, lighter skin vs. darker skin; old New Yorkers vs. Southern migrants
vs. proud immigrants from the British West Indies.

And of course, there was money. Wealthy Harlemites gathered together in
specific areas - on Sugar Hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, or on Strivers Row
- as the rich always have. But in the ghetto these enclaves were more
heterogeneous and interesting than they were in New York's white
neighborhoods. On Strivers Row alone, there lived at various times the
composers W. C. Handy and Eubie Blake; Dr. Louis T. Wright, a prominent
surgeon; Henry Pace, the founder of Black Swan Records; the fine heavyweight
Harry Wills; the comedian Stepin Fetchit - and Mr. Powell himself.

NO neighborhood better exemplifies both the triumph and the frustration of
Harlem than Strivers Row, on 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and
Eighth Avenues. On its two blocks, lovely, ethereal yellow- and rust-brick
Italianate town houses seem to almost float above the branches of the
slender trees along the sidewalk.

Originally called the King Model Houses, they were designed by Stanford
White and several other leading New York architects of the 1890's. One can
still find gates on some of them with the ancient imprecation "Walk Your
Horses," directed at the sports who liked to race their horses along the
broad avenues. There are even back alleys, providing residents with those
luxuries so rare in Manhattan, house decks and garages.

Yet Strivers Row was designed for white people. When not enough of them
would stay, refusing to live in an increasingly black Harlem, the Equitable
Life Insurance Company kept the buildings vacant for a year before finally
giving in, and allowing African-Americans to buy them. Even in Harlem, black
people had to be insulted before their money was accepted.

One other extant building tells the story of the Harlem of the 40's, and
what lay in store for it: the vast Art Deco armory on 142nd Street. The
armory was built for the 369th Regiment, the "Harlem Hellfighters," after
their return from World War I. Forced to fight with French troops, the
Hellfighters had distinguished themselves, serving longer in continuous
combat than any other American fighting unit, and they had marched back up
Fifth Avenue in triumph with their band breaking into "Here Comes My Daddy
Now" as they crossed into Harlem.

But for World War II, most of the 369th was trained in the Deep South, under
white officers, along with tens of thousands of other black soldiers.
Throughout the war, the people of Harlem had been receiving letters from
their young men telling of how shabbily they were being treated, both by
their white commanders and by the sheriffs and the police of Southern towns.

The letters, combined with news reports of white police officers and white
mobs assaulting and even killing black soldiers and black defense workers
around the country, brought people of all classes in Harlem together by the
summer of 1943. James Baldwin would remember seeing "the strangest
combinations" of people, standing about in tense, silent groups, churchgoers
and "the most flagrant disbelievers."

"Something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had all,
incredibly, seen a common vision," he wrote, "and on each face there seemed
to be the same strange, bitter shadow."

ALL that summer, the conflagration crept palpably closer, with every
precaution taken against it only more enraging than the last. Military
authorities had the Savoy closed, ostensibly to preserve the morals of our
fighting men but mostly to prevent "racemixing," and motorcycle police
patrols roared constantly through the streets, looking out for trouble. When
the riot did come, with the shooting at the Braddock Hotel, Harlem would be
permanently altered. Ultimately, the fury behind it would leave standing
only a few suggestions of what had gone before, peeking out here and there.

This largely vanished Harlem may be most readily understood from the inside,
looking out at those broad views of the looming city and its sentinel
skyscrapers. So accessible and yet so unobtainable, still spurning those it
had so arbitrarily driven out. To have looked upon that city every day, to
understand the hatred and bigotry it represented even if you had no desire
to join with it, must have been all but unbearable.