waiter with the cooks and bartenders. Both of these, depending on how they liked the waiter,
could make his job miserable or pleasant-and I meant to become indispensable. Inside of a week,
I had succeeded with both. And the customers who had seen me among them around the bar,
recognizing me now in the waiter's jacket, were pleased and surprised; and they couldn't have
been more friendly. And I couldn't have been more solicitous.
"Another drink?... Right away, sir... Would you like dinner?... It's very good... Could I get
you a menu, sir?... Well, maybe a sandwich?"
Not only the bartenders and cooks, who knew everything about everything, it seemed to me, but
even the customers, also began to school me, in little conversations by the bar when I wasn't
busy. Sometimes a customer would talk to me as he ate. Sometimes I'd have long talks-
absorbing everything-with the real old-timers, who had been around Harlem since Negroes first
came there.
That, in fact, was one of my biggest surprises: that Harlem hadn't always been a community of
Negroes.
It first had been a Dutch settlement, I learned. Then began the massive waves of poor and half-
starved and ragged immigrants from Europe, arriving with everything they owned in the world in
bags and sacks on their backs. The Germans came first; the Dutch edged away from them, and
Harlem became all German.
Then came the Irish, running from the potato famine. The Germans ran, looking down their noses
at the Irish, who took over Harlem. Next, the Italians; same thing-the Irish ran from them. The
Italians had Harlem when the Jews came down the gangplanks-and then the Italians left.
Today, all these same immigrants' descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the
descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.
I was staggered when old-timer Harlemites told me that while this immigrant musical chairs game
had been going on, Negroes had been in New York City since 1683, before any of them came,
and had been ghettoed all over the city.They had first been in the Wall Street area; then they
were pushed into Greenwich Village. The next shove was up to the Pennsylvania Station area.
And men, the last stop before Harlem, the black ghetto was concentrated around 52nd Street,
which is how 52nd Street got the Swing Street name and reputation that lasted long after the
Negroes were gone.
Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish
Harlem apartment house. The Jews flew from that house, then from that block, and more
Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran, and still more Negroes
came uptown, until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today-virtually all black.
Then, early in the 1920's music and entertainment sprang up as an industry in Harlem, supported
by downtown whites who poured uptown every night. It all started about the time a tough young
New Orleans cornet man named Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong climbed off a train in New York
wearing clodhopper policemen's shoes, and started playing with Fletcher Henderson. In 1925,
Small's Paradise had opened with crowds all across Seventh Avenue; in 1926, the great Cotton
Club, where Duke Ellington's band would play for five years; also in 1926 the Savoy Ballroom
opened, a whole block front on Lenox Avenue, with a two-hundred-foot dance floor under
spotlights before two bandstands and a disappearing rear stage.
Harlem's famous image spread until it swarmed nightly with white people from all over the world.
The tourist buses came there. The Cotton Club catered to whites only, and hundreds of other
clubs ranging on down to cellar speakeasies catered to white people's money. Some of the best-
known were Connie's Inn, the Lenox Club, Barron's, The Nest Club, Jimmy's Chicken Shack, and
Minton's. The Savoy, the Golden Gate, and the