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155 8 Rise and Fall of the Original Swing Street w E St 1 3 3 r D St r E E t between Lenox and Seventh Avenues is a quiet stretch of brownstones and tenement-style apartment houses, the kind of block that typifies this section of central Harlem. In the summer neighbors gather along stoops, set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk, and cook barbecue dinners in open pits—a scene that recalls the community and daily exchange of small-town life. The placidity is shaken on Sundays by the clapping and shouting from a handful of storefront churches, urging their faithful into waves of transformation. But come Monday the street is still again. Flash back to the early 1930s, and the scene is entirely different. Nights and early mornings are filled with the impatient honking of flat-topped taxis, jockeying for position within the clamor of the street’s western section , close to Seventh Avenue. Society figures, celebrities, and everyday New Yorkers emerge to slip under awnings imprinted with names like “Covan’s” and “Pod’s,” creeping down tiny staircases into the street’s basement -level speakeasies. They are drawn by the bawdy blues belting of the stout, unapologetically lesbian Gladys Bentley or the ribald vocalist Mary Dixon urging her lover to “Take your time with what you do, Make me cry for more of you.” Others long to smoke, sit quietly, and marvel at the rolling “stride” piano playing of Willie “the Lion” Smith, making a single beat-up tuneless upright sound like an orchestra. For everyone, the liquor and (in some places) marijuana was plentiful , and, in those days of Prohibition, patrons could get giddy on Harlem’s famous “Top and Bottom” cocktail (a pink concoction of gin and wine), secure in knowing that the police rarely came around—except for a drink, of course. Downtown whites called the block “Jungle Alley,” but few Harlemites during this age of the Renaissance used that kind of language, with its hint of racism. To them, 133rd Street was simply a place where they could relax, socialize, and escape the segregation of the more expensive white-oriented nightspots—such as Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club— that populated other sections of Harlem.1 156 Chapter 8 In the words of Billie Holiday: “133rd Street was the real swing street, like 52nd Street later tried to be.” Holiday was referring to the midtown block that became a tourist haven beginning in the mid-1930s, the site of jazz emporia like the Onyx, the Famous Door, and Jimmy Ryan’s; but for the scores of musicians who played there, 133rd Street would always be the true article. Things were swinging to beat all hell on 133rd between Lenox and Seventh avenues in the mid-twenties . . . As soon as it was dark, the cellar joints started to open up for a long night which sometimes extended to noon of the following day. (Willie “the Lion” Smith, 1964)2 By the late 1910s African American Harlem was jumping to the hot sounds of ragtime and early jazz. One of the old Tenderloin’s most popular cafes, Banks’s, had followed the uptown migration and moved into new quarters on 135th Street. Another, the Douglass Club on 28th Street, had also transplanted to Harlem after its owner, prizefighter Edmond Johnson, grew tired of dealing with incidents of racial harassment, including one attack in 1910 that left two white aggressors dead. With the further addition of Barron’s, Leroy’s, and Jerry Preston’s Orient, Harlem was becoming the kind of place that would inspire the African American novelist Claude McKay to write of “the sugared laughter . . . all night long, ragtime and ‘blues’ playing somewhere . . . singing somewhere, dancing somewhere!”3 Then, in January 1920, nightlife in Harlem—and across the city— received a powerful blow, or so it seemed. In truth, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol—or, rather, the Volstead Act that enforced it—only made the sporting scene that much stronger, as it forced liquor consumption underground, into brownstone basements and speakeasies, away from the public eye. It also made liquor more expensive, but Harlem, perhaps more than any other New York locality , offered various ways to get (borrowing a phrase from John O’ Hara’s heroine, Gloria Wandrous) “stewed to the balls” on any budget. Prohibition added grist to Harlem’s gin mill, planting the seed for the rise of 133rd Street and much of...

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