[Dixielandjazz] Some Interesting Jazz History

[Stephen G Barbone]

This is a long article but an interesting read for lovers of the  
historical side of the music. Talks about San Juan Hill,  the cradle  
of NYC jazz including Reisenweber's where the ODJB and Dixieland rose  
to fame some early James P Johnson snippets,  about where the  
Charleston was born and the racial tensions that may well have spawned  
the tune "That's Why They Call Me Shine".  Now we know it as the area  
where Lincoln Center is.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
NY Times - February 1, 2008 - by John Strausbaugh
Cradle for Serious Grooving"

IT’S 7:30 on a weekday evening, and the Josie Robertson Plaza at the  
heart of Lincoln Center is crowded. Slender teenagers from Juilliard’s  
ballet program, hair still up in tight “bunhead” knots, dart like  
gazelles toward the New York State Theater, where City Ballet is about  
to perform. They cut through the older operagoers flowing toward the  
Metropolitan Opera House. Film fans stroll diagonally across the  
plaza, heading to the Walter Reade Theater.

The mood is cooler at Jazz at Lincoln Center nearby in the Time Warner  
Center. In Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, musicians play against the backdrop  
of the club’s wall of windows, offering patrons at the bar and small  
tables a spectacular view of Columbus Circle at night.

This kind of activity has characterized the neighborhood since the  
1960s. But long before President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground for  
the Lincoln Center performing arts complex in 1959, the area from  
Columbus Circle through the neighborhoods called Lincoln Square and  
San Juan Hill was already something of an arts center. Jazz and opera  
and rock ’n’ roll, Shakespeare and Ibsen and musical theater, the  
visual arts and the invention of the Charleston all happened there.

Lincoln Square, the area from Columbus Circle and West 59th Street up  
to West 72nd Street, between Central Park and the Hudson River, is now  
thick, and becoming thicker, with giant middle-class residential  
complexes and soaring commercial towers. Lincoln Center is undergoing  
a rebuilding, including extensive renovations to Alice Tully Hall and  
the Juilliard. The goal is completion in 2009.

In the early 20th century, however, Lincoln Square’s streetscapes  
hugged the ground with rows of tenements and brownstones, punctuated  
by warehouses and industrial lofts. Its residents were mostly working  
class and poor, with a notable contingent of artists and bohemians. On  
its eastern fringe stood a variety of theaters and music halls.

Squeezed into the middle, roughly from 59th to 65th Streets between  
Amsterdam Avenue and the 11th Avenue railroad tracks, was San Juan  
Hill, one of the largest black neighborhoods in Manhattan before the  
rise of Harlem.

On an icy, blustery December morning, I toured San Juan Hill with the  
historian Marcy Sacks, author of “Before Harlem: The Black Experience  
in New York City Before World War I” (University of Pennsylvania  
Press, 2006). We stood outside two of the neighborhood’s last old  
houses, 242-244 West 61st Street, with new construction looming beside  
them.

In the early 1900s the reformer Mary White Ovington observed that San  
Juan Hill’s “tall, monotonous tenements” were “the worst type which  
the city affords.” Up to 5,000 people lived jammed into a single  
block; beds were often used in shifts, shared by boarders.

Ms. Sacks explained that the neighborhood might have been named to  
honor the United States Army’s black 10th Cavalry, which fought at the  
battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

But, she said, “the more accepted story is that it really reflected  
the violence and the tension that were going on constantly in this  
neighborhood between black residents of San Juan Hill and the Italians  
to the north and the Irish to the south in Hell’s Kitchen.”

A century ago that fighting was constant, from small territorial  
skirmishes along the black-white dividing lines to full-scale street  
warfare. “Race Rioters At It Again,” read a headline in The New York  
Times in 1905; “Bullets and Bricks Fly in Race Riot,” read another, in  
1907.

At the same time, “there was a great and thriving night scene going on  
in San Juan Hill,” Ms. Sacks said. “In the basements of a lot of  
tenements were clubs that ranged from really cheap dives to higher- 
level, higher-scale clubs.” They included poolrooms, saloons, dance  
halls and bordellos. “On any given Friday or Saturday night there  
could be some major partying happening,” she said.

In 1913 the pianist James P. Johnson was playing at a West 62nd Street  
club called the Jungles Casino. Black sailors and dock workers from  
the nearby waterfront, many of them from the Carolinas and other  
Southern coastal states, frequented the club and did what Johnson  
later recalled as “wild and comical” dances. One particular style  
inspired him to write an accompanying song.

In 1923 Johnson’s musical revue “Runnin’ Wild” had its premiere at the  
Colonial Theater on Broadway between West 62nd and 63rd Streets, site  
of the Harmony Atrium since 1979. It featured the song and dance from  
the Jungles Casino that became synonymous with the Roaring Twenties:  
the “Charleston.”

The New Colonial also brought Fred and Adele Astaire to its stage and,  
in 1910, Charlie Chaplin, performing in a British farce, “The Wow-Wows.”

Phil Schaap, the jazz historian and curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center,  
said jazz took a big leap in popularity in January 1917, when the  
Original Dixieland Jazz Band (also spelled “Jass” at the time) came  
from Chicago to play at Reisenweber’s Cafe, one of the large, popular  
lobster palaces of the era, which stood at the southwest corner of  
West 58th Street and Eighth Avenue.

“Within two weeks the lines went all the way down to 50th Street,” Mr.  
Schaap said. The band recorded songs for the Victor Talking Machine  
Company (precursor to RCA Victor) on Feb. 26. A week later the record  
was released, he said. “And before the month of March 1917 was over,  
it sold a million copies.”

Later, beginning in the mid-1940s, the neighborhood was a crucible of  
bebop. On the north side of West 66th Street between Central Park West  
and Columbus Avenue, a block now dominated by the offices of the ABC  
network, stood the Lincoln Square Center, where Dizzy Gillespie,  
Charlie Parker, Max Roach and others played. On the same block was the  
St. Nicholas Arena. It was mostly for boxing matches but, Mr. Schaap  
noted, “Charlie Parker played dances there, and he made the legendary  
record ‘Bird at St. Nick’s’ there on Saturday, Feb. 18, 1950.”

A few years later the disc jockey Alan Freed, who had brought his  
radio show from Cleveland to WINS, played host to his first New York  
City “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball” at the St. Nick on Jan. 14 and 15,  
1955. Fats Domino, the Moonglows, the Harptones and others performed  
for 6,000 teenagers each night.

San Juan Hill was home to a few jazz giants. The Phipps Houses, still  
standing at 233-247 West 63rd and 234-248 West 64th Street between  
Amsterdam and West End Avenues, were completed in 1912. The buildings,  
model tenements, were financed by the philanthropist Henry Phipps,  
friend and partner to Andrew Carnegie, to help alleviate the  
neighborhood’s slum conditions.

Thelonious Monk, born in North Carolina in 1917, was a child when his  
family moved into the Phipps Houses. He stayed there most of his life  
and was often seen roaming local streets, a quiet and distant man lost  
in thought.

I strolled those streets recently with Ademola Olugebefola and his  
brother, Harold Thomas, now in their 60s, who grew up in the nearby  
Amsterdam Houses in the 1950s and 60s, and whose mother still lives  
there. “As young children we would laugh,” Mr. Olugebefola said.  
“Thelonious was eccentric to some degree. I can recall looking out my  
window in the winter and wondering why this guy would be walking  
around in a daze, or I guess singing to himself. Little did we know he  
was creating these masterpieces.”

“Grooving,” Mr. Thomas said. “Serious grooving.”

Another jazzman who lived in the neighborhood, Roger Ramirez, wrote  
“Lover Man” with Jimmy Davis and James Sherman. It became a Billie  
Holiday signature. When she died in 1959, her funeral was held at  
Church of St. Paul the Apostle at West 60th Street and Columbus  
Avenue. Mr. Schaap, then 8, stood across the street with his mother to  
pay their respects, he said.

Thomas Mellins, an architectural historian and co-author of “New York  
1960” (The Monacelli Press, 1995), took me for a walk around a few  
sites important in the area’s rich history of theater and the visual  
arts before Lincoln Center. We stood on the corner of West 62nd Street  
and Central Park West and gazed up at the Art Deco towers of the  
Century condominium building, completed in 1931 and named for the  
Century Theater that stood there previously. Called the New Theater  
when it opened in 1909, it was the brainchild of very wealthy New  
Yorkers, including J. P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor and Cornelius  
Vanderbilt, who, Mr. Mellins said, “had a notion of using theater not  
only to entertain but to educate people.” Their hope was to draw  
wealthy arts patrons from the East Side along with less-well-off  
neighbors to light operas and plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen.

The experiment failed. Reopened as the Century Theater, it became  
better known for popular musicals like Irving Berlin’s “Yip, Yip,  
Yaphank” and “Sinbad” with Al Jolson (featuring the hit songs “Swanee”  
and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody”).

Around the corner at 22 West 63rd Street stood the 63rd Street Music  
Hall, later Daly’s 63rd Street Theater. “Shuffle Along,” the revue by  
Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, played  
there in 1921 (introducing the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry”);  
Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” in 1925; Mae West’s “Sex” in  
1926; and “Keep Shufflin,’ ” which included music by James P. Johnson  
and Fats Waller, in 1928.

O’Neill, who was born in a Broadway hotel room in what later became  
known as Times Square, lived a brief part of his peripatetic life at  
the Lincoln Square Arcade, a barnlike theater-studio-loft space at  
Broadway and West 65th Street. “It was in many ways an incubator of  
talent,” Mr. Mellins said; many artists lived, worked, taught and  
caroused there.

The artist George Bellows, who in 1907 made the evocative drawing “Tin  
Can Battle, San Juan Hill, New York,” was one of O’Neill’s roommates.  
The muralist Thomas Hart Benton later remembered being stabbed by an  
enraged girlfriend in the Arcade. It was torn down in 1958 to make way  
for the Juilliard School, another incubator of talent. Students have  
included Kevin Kline, Leontyne Price, Robin Williams and Wynton  
Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

A big change came to San Juan Hill after World War II when several  
square blocks of tenements, from West 61st to West 64th Street between  
Amsterdam and West End Avenues, just behind where Lincoln Center now  
stands, were demolished to make way for the Amsterdam Houses. It’s an  
unusually handsome public housing complex on a parklike campus with  
broad, tree-lined paths.

“Central Park was our playground, two blocks over,” Harold Thomas said  
of growing up at the Amsterdam Houses. “Seven, eight blocks up was  
Riverside Park. That was our backyard. We would go down to the Hudson  
River and fish with our little poles. We also would catch crabs. They  
must have been three inches. Mother said, ‘You ain’t cooking this up  
in my house.’ ”

Even bigger change began in the mid-1950s, when the Mayor’s Committee  
on Slum Clearance, headed by Robert Moses, declared Lincoln Square and  
San Juan Hill a blighted slum ripe for urban renewal. Although Moses  
is often accused of having favored suburbs and highways at the city’s  
expense, Mr. Mellins argued that he “had a vision of maintaining the  
core of the city.” He added, “One of the strategies for that was to  
make sure that cultural institutions, educational institutions and  
even political institutions such as the United Nations stayed in  
Manhattan.”

Neighborhood residents, artists and small businesses resisted  
relocation, eventually taking their case, unsuccessfully, to the  
Supreme Court. In 1958 almost 17,000 residents were forced to leave,  
and acres of tenements and brownstones began to come down to clear  
space for Lincoln Center and surrounding high rises.

Mr. Thomas and his brother Mr. Olugebefola watched it happen. Asked if  
he thought the neighborhood had been a blighted slum, Mr. Olugebefola  
replied: “It depends on your interpretation of what a blighted slum  
is. The buildings were kind of run down.”

“Lincoln Center was a treat,” Mr. Thomas said. “We had cultural  
activities where we were involved. There was never a lack of  
something. But we lost a whole set of our classmates when they decided  
to build Lincoln Center.”

Back in Josie Robertson Plaza, I watched orchestra musicians rolling  
their instrument cases toward the subway. Over at Jazz at Lincoln  
Center, Mr. Schaap was teaching a class in his Swing University,  
evening courses in jazz history and appreciation. If Lincoln Center  
uprooted part of the neighborhood, it has also kept good watch over  
its traditions.