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The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue (1923-1936), then briefly in the midtown Theater District (1936–1940).
The club operated during the United States' era of Prohibition and Jim Crow era racial segregation.
Black people initially could not patronize the Cotton Club, but the venue featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant; vocalists Adelaide Hall, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the Will Vodery Choir, The Mills Brothers, Nina Mae McKinney, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and dancers such as Katherine Dunham, Bill Robinson, The Nicholas Brothers, Charles 'Honi' Coles, Leonard Reed, Stepin Fetchit, the Berry Brothers, The Four Step Brothers, Jeni Le Gon and Earl Snakehips Tucker.
At its prime, the Cotton Club served as a hip meeting spot, with regular Celebrity Nights on Sundays featuring guests such as Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.
In 1920, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson rented the upper floor of the building on the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in the heart of Harlem and opened an intimate supper club called the Club Deluxe. Owney Madden, a prominent bootlegger and gangster, took over the club after his release from Sing Sing in 1923 and changed its name to the Cotton Club. The two arranged a deal that allowed Johnson to remain the club's manager. Madden used the cotton club as an outlet to sell his #1 beer to the prohibition crowd.
When the club closed briefly in 1925 for selling liquor, it soon reopened without interference from the police. An extensive drink list continued to be available on the Cotton Club menu and sold to white guests following the shut down. Herman Stark then became the stage manager. Harlem producer Leonard Harper directed the first two of three opening night floor-shows at the new venue.
The Cotton Club was a whites-only establishment with rare exceptions for black celebrities such as Ethel Waters and Bill Robinson. It reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as darkies in the plantation South. A 1938 menu inclued this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.
Shows at the Cotton Club were musical revues, and several were called Cotton Club Parade followed by the year. Musical revues were created twice a year in hopes of becoming successful Broadway shows.
The revues featured dancers, singers, comedians, and variety acts, as well as a house band.
The club closed temporarily in 1936 after the race riot in Harlem the previous year. Carl Van Vechten had vowed to boycott the club for having such racist policies as refusing entry to African Americans in place.
The Cotton Club reopened later that year at Broadway and 48th. The site chosen for the new Cotton Club was a big room on the top floor of a building where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet, an important midtown crossroads at the center of the Great White Way, the Broadway Theater District.
More information: Harlem World Magazine
The Cotton Club is a 1984 American crime drama film co-written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on James Haskins' 1977 book of the same name.
The story centers on the Cotton Club, a Harlem jazz club in the 1930s. The film stars Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane, and Lonette McKee, with Bob Hoskins, Jennifer Grey, James Remar, Nicolas Cage, Allen Garfield, Gwen Verdon, Fred Gwynne, and Laurence Fishburne in supporting roles.
The film was noted for its over-budget production costs, and took a total of five years to make. Despite being a disappointment at the box-office, the film received generally positive reviews and was nominated for several awards, including Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Picture (Drama) and Oscars for Best Art Direction (Richard Sylbert, George Gaines) and Best Film Editing.
inspired to make The Cotton Club by a picture-book history of the nightclub by James Haskins, Robert Evans was the film's original producer. Evans hoped the film would bring public attention to African-American history in a similar way that Gone with the Wind did for the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era.
More information: Vanity Fair
because it hired us, for one thing,
at a time when it was really rough
for Black performers.
Lena Horne
