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 halfstarved
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 bestknown
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
Renaissance ballrooms battled for the crowds-the Savoy introduced such attractions as Thursday
Kitchen Mechanics' Nights, bathing beauty contests, and a new car given away each Saturday
night. They had bands from all across the country in the ballrooms and the Apollo and Lafayette
theaters. They had colorful bandleaders like 'Fess Williams in his diamond-studded suit and top
hat, and Cab Calloway in his white zoot suit to end all zoots, and his wide-brimmed white hat and
string tie, setting Harlem afire with "Tiger Rag" and "St. James Infirmary" and "Minnie the
Moocher."
Blacktown crawled with white people, with pimps, prostitutes, bootleggers, with hustlers of all
kinds, with colorful characters, and with police and prohibition agents. Negroes danced like they
never have anywhere before or since. I guess I must have heard twenty-five of the old-timers in
Small's swear to me that they had been the first to dance in the Savoy the "Lindy Hop" which was
born there in 1927, named for Lindbergh, who had just made his flight to Paris.
Even the little cellar places with only piano space had fabulous keyboard artists such as James P.
Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton, and singers such as Ethel Waters. And at four A.M., when all the
legitimate clubs had to close, from all over town the white and Negro musicians would come to
some prearranged Harlem after-hours spot and have thirty-and forty-piece jam sessions that
would last into the next day.
When it all ended with the stock market crash in 1929, Harlem had a world reputation as
darsice
(darsice)
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