THE LAST DANCE
The Life and Death of New York's Savoy Ballroom
WHEN LEE MOATES TOOK DELMA NICHOLSON BY THE HAND, spun her around, and dipped her so low to the ground that her feet swung off the floor, they were simply going through the old motions. They had contorted their bodies round each other for years as a pair of celebrated Lindy Hoppers at the famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. During the height of the swing era, the pair, along with fellow Lindy Hopper George Sullivan, developed a new solo dance routine called “The Stew,” an explosive series of opposing arms and legs flailing about in all directions. Now, on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 1958, with slightly more effort behind their moves due to age, they were clinging on to one final dance at their old stomping grounds. After almost a decade of rumors, innuendos, high hopes, and ultimately fears, the Savoy Ballroom was finally set to close. Earlier in the day, a Steinway piano played by the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Erroll Garner and Fats Waller was auctioned off for $450 along with tables, bar stools, chairs, and other mainstays of the ballroom now deemed artifacts. Six months later, the Savoy was demolished.
During the 1920s and 30s, between 131st and 144th Streets in New York City, there were some fifty active night clubs, ballrooms, and dance halls, each with their own unique character, flavor, and ambiance. Looking up north from Lenox Avenue from the Savoy Ballroom, across 142nd street, was the Cotton Club, where Black entertainers such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway would perform for an almost exclusively white audience. Looking directly across the street from the Savoy was the Capital Palace. Walking south down Lenox for fifteen minutes or so to 133rd St., or as it was simply called “The Street,” you would find Connie’s Inn, the Rhythm Club, Dickie Wells’s Shim Sham Club, the Log Cabin, and more. A fantastical map of Harlem nightclubs by the legendary illustrator E. Simms Campbell shows this overlapping chaos. The mixed result of music from big bands and blues singers spilling out onto the street from four or five adjacent clubs converge into what would have been a wonderful cacophony. Campbell’s drawing is accompanied by descriptive annotations of each venue: the Radium Club offers “a big breakfast dance every Sunday morning 4 or 5 a.m.,” “Nothing happens” at Club Hot-Cha “before 2 a.m., ask for Clarence,” and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson “The Worlds Greatest tapdancer” can be seen at the Lafayette Theatre. Campbell did himself a service attempting to illustrate “The Street” writing on a small scroll that “there are clubs opening and closing at all times — There are too many to put them all on this map…”
The major swing bands and performers of the time were anchored to clubs like the Savoy and Cotton Club and the Log Cabin, and their constant presence created a distinctive culture exclusive to those few surrounding blocks. At the Savoy, starting in 1931, the Chick Webb Orchestra became the venue’s house band and originated the ballroom’s most recognizable musical export: the swing tune “Stompin’ At The Savoy.” While in residence at the Savoy, Webb’s band would hold Battle of the Bands contests between his orchestra and the leading swing bands of the day including Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. Chick Webb wiped the floor with Goodman. But the legendary battle between Webb and Basie’s orchestras was the subject of much debate. Though the judge declared Webb the winner against the Kansas City import that night, many there remember Count Basie winning the battle outright. Basie, who had recently arrived in Harlem with his band, recalled that he was just relieved to walk away from the contest without embarrassing himself.
Similarly, there were dance battles between groups of Shim Shamers and Liddy Hoppers who would meet at crosstown ballrooms. The swing dancer Norma Miller, who would become a recognizable figure at the Savoy, grew up right behind the ballroom. When she finally went in the first time, she was quickly discovered by Twist Mouth George Ganaway, “the greatest dancer at the Savoy.” Miller remembered how he “just threw me up; my feet never touched the ground. People were screaming and he put me on top of his shoulders.” While most of the jazz clubs in the 1930s and 40s were segregated, such as the all white Cotton Club, the Savoy was one of the only integrated dance venues. “We lived in a very segregated country,” Norma Miller recalled half a century later, “but the amazing thing about the [Savoy] Ballroom was it was the first building in America, ever in the world, that opened its doors, completely integrated. At the time we didn’t understand that.”
The experience of entering the Savoy Ballroom was an architectural masterclass in subverting expectations and extending anticipation. After passing under the long rectangular marquee, adorned with brightly lit treble clefs and pairs of sixteenth notes which stretched far out over the Lenox Avenue sidewalk, one would open a pair of double doors and see, not a bandstand or ballroom, but stairs. The wide marble staircase ascended straight and opened up into the middle of a second floor ballroom, but with no dance floor or band shell in sight. Instead, a long line of intimate loges on either side of a back wall which stretched down the length of the block. But in turning around 180 degrees back towards the downward staircase, the room finally opened up, revealing a golden double band shell that towered over the musicians, all surrounded by a large dance floor. Beyond that, a series of round tables with complete bar to the left and lounge chairs and a soda bar to the right. The space during its heyday could accommodate upwards of 4,000 people.
The London-based dancer Sharon Davis has created a vast online resource, outlining in meticulous detail what the Savoy would have looked like in its prime. By using photographs, historic documents, and floor plans, Davis has laid down the groundwork in creating a three dimensional Savoy Ballroom, brought to life in virtual reality. Soon, just by donning a VR headset, a 21st century swing band obsessive can take a stroll around the bright greens, reds, and golds of the Savoy’s interior.
For those unable to experience the Savoy in person, the sounds of the ballroom echoed well beyond Harlem thanks to a series of coast-to-coast radio broadcasts. Beginning usually around 11PM on Saturdays and Sundays, radios across the country could tune in to swing bands performing thirty minute sets. Ella Fitzgerald, who was put on the map singing with the Chick Webb Orchestra in her late teens, gained near universal appeal with her appearances on these broadcasts.
The Savoy’s reputation across the country became one of cultural experimentation. The unique, daring, and varied style of dance and music and fashion would inspire and inform trends that rippled throughout the U.S.. But even within those blocks that made up Harlem, as Barbara Englebrecht wrote in her Swinging at the Savoy, the Savoy was “a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the ‘soul’ of a neighborhood.” Langston Hughes called it “the heartbeat of Harlem.” The Savoy Ballroom was not only a critical cultural artery for those who paid an entrance fee, but for a much broader, Black centered American culture.
AFTER THE WAR, HARLEM SAW MIXED BLESSINGS. The economic boom that ripped throughout the United States was felt in Harlem, but not nearly to the same degree as the rest of the country. Some Black families were slowly beginning to enter something resembling a middle class lifestyle. The dance halls and night clubs and ballrooms were alive and well.
But wartime industrial production opened doors to manufacturing outside of major cities. Building planes and tanks proved far easier out in the Midwest, say, than confined to the grid of a large city. Now with the war over, the manufacturing sector which helped economically support African American and immigrant families was leaving Harlem. By the end of the 1940s, half of Harlem families lived below the poverty line. The housing infrastructure which propped up the Great Migration was beginning to overcrowd. “Rents are 10 to 58 per cent higher than anywhere else in the city,” James Baldwin wrote in his Notes of a Native Son, “food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality…Negroes, traditionally the last to be hired and the first to be fired, are finding jobs harder to get, and, while prices are rising implacably, wages are going down.”
The Savoy Ballroom, on the other hand, came out of the war firmly on the positive side of Harlem’s mixed blessings. Even with the swing era firmly in the rear-view mirror, attendance records were being set during the early years of the 1950s. The tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet brought in over 10,000 people during a two day concert set in February of 1950. One night alone in 1954, the mid-century crooner Nat King Cole held a “farewell and birthday party” at the Savoy which exceeded capacity with some 5,000 paying attendees. Perry Como and Harry Belafonte similarly brought in capacity crowds during the mid 1950s. And even though there were nights when only 50 to 60 people would show up to the Savoy during the post war period, there were still plenty of hopes that the ballroom would continue to survive. Charles Buchanan, the manager and co-owner of the Savoy, went as far as to pay $109,000 in 1948 to have the venue remodeled.
But the privations that fell over most of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s was soon to arrive at the Savoy. James Baldwin continued on in his illustration of post-war Harlem: “All over…there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”
On April 14, 1951, The Baltimore Afro-American, the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States, reported that “a deal” was “going down in Harlem.” Two months later, the New York Herold Tribune also reported that a deal had been made in Harlem between a construction company and the City of New York to create a “housing project.” The location of the new project, which over time morphed into projects, was unclear. But one thing was certain: several of the most active dance halls, ballrooms, and nightclubs were standing in the way of the new housing projects. The Afro-American stated definitively that the “housing project will cause the Savoy Ballroom to be torn down.” The Tribune added that in addition to the Savoy, the Golden Gate Ballroom, a competing club next door on 142nd Street, and Club Sudan were going to be demolished. Around the same time, Billboard magazine reassured their readers that if the Savoy was to be torn down, there were plans to build a new Savoy at a different location.
The Savoy, along with other cultural landmarks that were central to the cultural life of the Great Migration and the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, were now caught in the cross-hairs of Robert Moses’s Harlem Slum Clearance program. When it came to shaping, building, and destroying New York in the post war period, it would seem that all roads, literally and figuratively, led to New York City Construction Coordinator Robert Moses. After creating his own position almost entirely out of thin air, Moses wrote into the bill which created his position that the Construction Coordinator shall, singularly, represent the city in all dealings with the federal government. So when the federal government passed the National Housing Act of 1949, it was Robert Moses who would have near total control over any federal funds New York received through the new program.
In Title One of the 1949 National Housing Act, cities were allowed to access federal funds in order to seize, clear, and make available areas considered “slums” to private contractors for redevelopment. These newly developed areas would create housing for mostly people like the ones that were displaced to begin with, low income immigrants and people of color. Though there was a slight dip in the economic life of post-war Harlem, due in large part to a diminishing manufacturing sector, the New York Times noted in the mid-1950s that the area was “on the upswing” in terms of “employment and infrastructure.” Nonetheless, according to one of a dozen Slum Clearance Plan brochures detailing the conditions of West 132nd to 135th on Lenox Avenue, an area which included “The Street”, not one residential building within these three blocks met the requirements of being “well-kept.” To be graded as “well-kept,” an older building had to be “very clean, requiring no major repairs or painting.” As it would turn out, 146 out of the 164 residential buildings examined were considered “run-down.” Such a building “might have deteriorated to the state of being in object for demolition.” Regardless of the fact that the Savoy Ballroom was far from being “run-down” and having just recently received a six figure upgrade, the site was still in the way of the wrecking ball.
What would rise in its place was Delano Village, a series of red brick high rises built by the Axelrod Construction Company. Axelrod had bought the site from the City of New York in July of 1952, less than a year after construction began on the site a few blocks south between 132nd and 135th Streets. Though intended to house poor people of color, after competing with other developers for land rights, Delano Village along with dozens of other housing projects decided it would be far more lucrative to build middle and upper class housing. Financial incentives aside, many developers simply did not want to rent or sell to the ever growing Black and Latino population of Harlem. By 1953, the buildings within the 200,000 square feet of what would become Delano Village were demolished and by the end of 1957, the first tenants moved into the new buildings.
The Savoy Ballroom, now surrounded on all sides by Delano Village, closed in July of 1958 “before a packed audience” according to The New York Amsterdam News. Though many cynically and indeed rightly believed that this was the end of the road for the Savoy, some still held out hopes that the Savoy could be saved. Whether its owner Charles Buchanan was one of those optimists is difficult to say. After failing to get a meeting with Mayor Robert Wagner, Buchanan went to Charles Axelrod, the president of the housing company, to work out a deal. Axelrod tentatively agreed to a deal to not demolish the ballroom but added that he would need final approval from the Slum Clearance Committee and Robert Moses.
When Charles A. came back to Charles B. in September, Axelrod came with a lease agreement in hand. In order for the Savoy Ballroom to survive, Buchanan would have to pay Axelrod’s company $45,000 a year in rent with a $73,000 deposit. Buchanan was under the assumption that Axelrod wanted far less, $30,000. The lease agreement, turning out to be far more expensive than expected, was never signed and Buchanan turned the Savoy over to the Axelrod Construction Company. During the negotiations, dozens of Harlem community groups and organizations protested to save the ballroom. As Harri Heinilä wrote in his End Of The Savoy, “a group called the ‘Friends and Patrons of Local Businesses’” led by Billy Butler, who years earlier had published a travel guide for Black travelers, tried to preserve the ballroom. They wrote, desperately, to Mayor Wagner and Robert Moses to save the Savoy.
However, before their September meeting, Charles Buchanan had actually planned to pay far more than $30,000. In July, Buchanan planned to spend upwards of $250,000 to remodel the Savoy and reopen the venue in September. Though in the long run, the offer made by Axelrod would have proven more expensive than $250K, in the short term, during what could have been a modified tenure as owner, Buchanan made the calculation to close rather than pay up or quite literally ship out to a new location — as the Cotton Club, the Savoy’s neighbor, had done in moving to Times Square years earlier.
So instead of a grand reopening in September 1958, there was an auction, and a final dance between Lee Moates and Delma Nicholson.
IN 2002, NORMA MILLER AND FRANKIE MANNING, members of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers and mainstays of the Savoy Ballroom, unveiled a commemorative plaque at Lenox Ave. between 141st and 142nd Streets; the brown and red and gold of the plaque blending in with the colossal brick housing project that stands directly behind. Of the dozens of clubs, ballrooms, and dance halls shown in Campbell’s dizzying map from 1932, not one is still in operation or was ever preserved. With the exception of a few commemorative plaques scattered throughout, there is hardly a trace of the Cotton Club, the Radium House, the Log Cabin, Connie’s Inn, or the Savoy Ballroom. For that matter, there is hardly a trace of what came in its place, the smaller clubs and bars that arose in the late 1940s and 1950s that laced 52nd Street and Seventh Avenue: the 3 Deuces, the Onyx, the Famous Door, Jimmy Ryan’s, Club Downbeat, or Club Carousel. The buildings that fostered the creation and cultivation of an American art of the highest order, are now paved over by apartments, parking lots, and highways. Whether the lack of any federal preservation project for these historical venues was due to their commercial function, or a seeming lack of importance, or tried and true racism is difficult to say. But it is notable that while this country maintains thousands of historic sites, not one of these cultural landmarks were saved in time.
It is near impossible to disentangle African American culture from a broader American culture. Our cultural exports, from our music, our fashion, our dances, our colloquialisms are by in large the product of Black creativity and art. The Savoy Ballroom was a physical manifestation of this cultural emulsification. Black visual art and fashion and music and dance and improvisation not only came together between 141st and 142nd Streets, but were created and formed along that long block. The elimination of such a cultural artery is in turn not only to the obvious detriment of Harlem and New York City, but to the country and, more broadly, to the world.
