Harlem Nightclubs in the 1920s: The Cotton Club and Beyond
On a December evening in 1927, a taxi turned off Lenox Avenue and pulled up at 142nd Street, where a long line of well-dressed white New Yorkers waited in the cold. At the head of the line stood a doorman in a long overcoat, examining invitations and whispering something to each guest as they entered. Inside, a vast room opened up, hung with red velvet and gold, populated with showgirls in exotic costumes, and centered on a bandstand where a slim pianist in white tie led his orchestra through a sophisticated new arrangement. The doorman was one of several; the front was the only part of the building the neighbors could see. The establishment was the Cotton Club, the most famous nightclub of the Jazz Age, and its orchestra was Duke Ellington’s.
The Cotton Club and the other Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s were the venues where the music, the dance, and the larger culture of the jazz age came together. The full story of the musicians who played in them is told in famous jazz musicians of the 1920s, and the music itself is traced in the history of jazz music.
The Harlem Context
By 1920, the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem had become the largest Black community in the United States. The Great Migration — the movement of roughly one million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North between 1910 and 1930 — had transformed the neighborhood. The Black population of Harlem grew to about 200,000 by the late 1920s, drawn by wartime industrial jobs, the search for an escape from Jim Crow, and the cultural pull of a community that was already becoming a Black cultural capital. The intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue was the heart of the new nightlife, dense with nightclubs, dance halls, theaters, and restaurants.
Harlem was also the home of the Harlem Renaissance, the extraordinary flowering of Black literature, art, music, and scholarship. The nightclubs of Harlem were the commercial arm of that renaissance. The relationship between the nightclubs and the writers was close; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were regulars, and the novelist Carl Van Vechten made the Harlem nightclub scene the subject of his controversial 1926 bestseller Nigger Heaven.
The Cotton Club
The Cotton Club was the most famous of the Harlem nightclubs, and the most contradictory. It opened in 1923 at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, in a space previously owned by the former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson (1878–1946). The club was taken over in 1923 by the British-born gangster Owney Madden (1891–1965), who had moved to New York from Kansas City and built a bootlegging empire in Harlem. Madden ran the Cotton Club from 1923 until 1935 and made it the most glamorous nightclub in America.
The Cotton Club was a whites-only establishment. The performers and staff were all Black — Ellington’s orchestra, the chorus girls known as the “Cotton Club Parade,” the dancers, the singers, the porters, the waiters — but the audience was admitted by invitation and was restricted to white patrons. The customers included the cream of New York society: the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, Jimmy Walker (the mayor of New York), the gangsters Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, and the columnist Walter Winchell.
The entertainment was famously lavish. The floor shows featured chorus girls in elaborate costumes. Ellington’s band was the house band from December 1927 until 1931, when Cab Calloway (1907–1994) took over. The radio broadcasts from the club were heard across the country and made Ellington and his musicians — Bubber Miley, Joe Nanton, Harry Carney, and the rest — into national stars. The full biography of the musicians who played there is told in famous jazz musicians of the 1920s.
The Savoy Ballroom
The Savoy Ballroom, which opened on March 12, 1926, at 596 Lenox Avenue, was the opposite of the Cotton Club in almost every respect. The Savoy was integrated from the start: it was the only major ballroom in Harlem that did not segregate its patrons, and its dance floor — ten thousand square feet of suspended sprung maple — was open to anyone who paid the admission. The Savoy’s capacity was about ten thousand, and on a busy Saturday night, two to four thousand couples would be on the floor at once.
The Savoy was known as the “Home of Happy Feet.” The house band, from 1931, was Chick Webb’s, and the regular visitors included virtually every important jazz musician in New York. The Savoy was the birthplace of the Lindy Hop in 1927 (named for aviator Charles Lindbergh’s “hop” across the Atlantic in May 1927), and the ballroom’s famous “Battle of the Bands” pitted Chick Webb’s orchestra against visiting bands, including those of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, in often furious competition.
The Apollo and the Lafayette
The Apollo Theater, today the most famous Black theater in America, was not the 1920s equivalent. The Apollo opened in 1934, and its famous Amateur Night began the same year. In the 1920s, the equivalent venue was the Lafayette Theatre, known as the “House Beautiful,” at Seventh Avenue and 131st Street. The Lafayette opened in 1912, served as a playhouse for Black audiences, and was the training ground for many of the era’s Black performers.
The Smaller Clubs
The other important Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s included Connie’s Inn, opened in 1923 at Seventh Avenue and 131st Street by the bootlegger Connie Immerman, which featured elaborate revues and was the site of the 1930 revue Hot Chocolates that introduced Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Small’s Paradise, opened in 1925 at 2294 Seventh Avenue by Ed Smalls, was the first Black-owned and operated nightclub in Harlem, and the only one that was open 24 hours a day. The Hot-Cha Club, the Yeah Man, the 101 Ranch, and the Baby Grand were other notable venues.
The Harlem clubs of the 1920s were part of a larger nightlife landscape that included the speakeasies opened during Prohibition. The connection between the two is treated in Prohibition and speakeasies.
The White Patrons’ “Slumming” Tours
The Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s were also the object of a peculiar phenomenon: the “slumming” tour. Wealthy white New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors — many of them, like the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, just back from a European trip — would take a taxi uptown to Harlem, eat dinner at a Black-owned restaurant, and spend the evening in one of the larger clubs. The slumming tours were a mark of the cultural prestige of Harlem nightlife, and they were also a form of racial voyeurism that Harlem intellectuals sharply criticized.
The Decline
The Harlem nightclub scene of the 1920s declined rapidly in the 1930s. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 wiped out the wealthy patronage on which the larger clubs depended. The gang wars of the early 1930s made the area dangerous. The death of many of the era’s great musicians (Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Chick Webb, Bubber Miley) and the migration of jazz’s commercial center away from Harlem further reduced the scene’s vitality. By the late 1930s, the great Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s were mostly gone, replaced by smaller, more local venues. Their legacy, however, has been enormous; the Cotton Club and the Savoy have become permanent features of American cultural memory, and the music played in them is still the music of the American century.