Category Archives: Green Book

Advocacy, Green Book, Hotel Carlyle

Before 1964, Jazz Musicians Traveled While Black

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Philadelphia Jazz Appreciation Month is in full swing. In a recent interview, I noted that jazz musicians performed in nightclubs where they could not sit and hotels where they could not stay. The jazz legends whose music paved the way for the Civil Rights movement were subjected to racial discrimination as they traveled while black.

In 1936, Victor H. Green, a postal worker and civil rights activist, published the first edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide to navigate Jim Crow laws in the South and de facto segregation in the North.

The “Green Book,” as it was called, lists hotels, tourist homes, restaurants, nightclubs, beauty parlors, barber shops and other services. Philadelphia hotels in the 1949 edition include the Attucks, Chesterfield and Douglass.

Douglass Hotel Bus Ad - Cropped

The list of clubs includes Emerson’s Tavern, the setting for the Tony Award-winning play, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” Café Society and Watts’ Zanzibar.

Cafe Society - Watts' Zanzibar

In the wake of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act which outlawed racial discrimination, the last edition of the “Green Book” was published in 1966-67.

UPDATE:  A documentary, “The Green Book Chronicles,” co-produced by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and Becky Wible Searles, is in production.

In an interview with NBCBLK, Ramsey said:

There was no Internet back then to get the Green Book, this was put together with love from black people for each other to keep each other safe. The Green Book to me was a love letter of sorts. There was a time when we loved each other so much that we would open our homes just to keep another black person safe. You could be a superstar, a singer, an artist and in those days still have no place to stay, eat or bathe while on the road, so this book was about the love and ability to preserve our dignity.

Show Ramsey and his team some love and make a donation to help them complete “The Green Book Chronicles.”

Advocacy, Green Book, Historic Preservation

Douglass Hotel

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In Jimmy Heath’s autobiography “I Walked with Giants,” drummer Roy Haynes recounted:

I met Jimmy around 1946 when I was with Luis Russell and we played the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. A lot of the big bands would come through the Earle. We stayed at the Douglas Hotel, which was in South Philly. That was the hotel where a lot of the big black bands stayed.

The building is still there. The historical marker out front notes that Billie Holiday lived here when she was in town.

Douglass Hotel

The Douglass Hotel was first listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book in 1938. The safe space was not just a place to lay one’s head. The legendary Show Boat was located in the lower level where John Coltrane recorded a live album in 1961 and 1963.

After the Show Boat, the space became the Bijou Café. Grover Washington, Jr. recorded live from the Bijou Café in 1977.

The lower level of 1409 Lombard Street was a magical space.

Green Book, Jazz Landmarks

Attucks Hotel

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Named after Crispus Attucks, the first patriot to die in the Boston Massacre, the Attucks Hotel was popular with Black entertainers and athletes who were not allowed to stay at Philadelphia hotels that catered to whites. Guests included Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella, Ella Fitzgerald, Redd Foxx, Satchel Paige, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Billie Holiday.

John Timpane of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote:

The year 1947 was a year of betrayal for [Billie] Holiday. She was at the peak of her career, earning upward of $60,000 a year, but hooked on heroin and opium. After a show at the Earle, her room at the Attucks Hotel was raided, and she was arrested on charges of narcotics possession.

From Monrovia Sound Studio:

Jelly Roll Morton and members of his orchestra would have had just a short drive of about 5 miles from the Attucks Hotel … to the R.C.A. studios in Camden, N.J. to carry out a contracted recording assignment. The route would have taken them across the Delaware River via the Delaware River Bridge (formally the Benjamin Franklin Bridge).

Hotel Attucks - Universal Institute Charter School

The Attucks Hotel is now home to Universal Institute Charter School.The school is part of Universal Companies, founded and chaired by legendary producer, songwriter, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Kenny Gamble.

Green Book, Jazz Landmarks, Main Channel

Royal Theater

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Opened in 1920, the Royal Theater was advertised as “America’s Finest Colored Photoplay House.” The all-black staff formed the nucleus of the Colored Motion Picture Operators Union.

The 1,200-seat theater showed movies by African American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. The small stage played host to luminaries such as Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Pearl Bailey, Della Reese and Cab Calloway.


South Philly residents were the Royal’s most loyal patrons and participated in talent shows and radio broadcasts. Business owners received increased foot traffic after Royal shows. But by the 1960s, the threat of the construction of an expressway in the neighborhood (that never materialized) and civil rights legislation which allowed blacks to move freely and patronize other entertainment venues, decimated the Royal’s neighborhood and attendance.

The Royal closed its doors in 1970. It is listed on the Philadelphia Register (1976) and National Register of Historic Places (1980).

Royal Theater Mural

The Royal Theater and adjoining parcels were purchased by music mogul Kenny Gamble from the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia in 2000 for $250,000.

UPDATE: In 2016, Kenny Gamble’s Universal Companies sold the Royal Theater. The facade is all that remains of the historic landmark. It, too, would have been demolished but the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia holds an easement.

Royal Theater Facadectomy

Green Book, Jazz Landmarks, Main Channel

Standard Theater

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A stop on the “Chitlin Circuit,” the Standard Theater was owned by African American entrepreneur John T. Gibson.

Standard Theater - Feature

Standard Theatre

From ExplorePAHistory.com

In 1914, Gibson bought the Standard Theatre on the 1100 block of South Street. His timing couldn’t have been better, for in the following years, tens of thousands of southern blacks would pour into the city of Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration unleashed by the First World War.

Young men and women, with good jobs and money in their pockets, flocked to Gibson’s Standard Theatre to see a fare of “High Class and Meritorious Vaudeville,” stage shows, and popular music. The Standard became a regular stop for Black performers on their national tours: comedians Bylow and Ashes, singers Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, Erma C. Miller’s Brown Skinned Models, popularly known as the “Black Rockettes,” and jazz bands led by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

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Advocacy, Cultural Heritage Preservation, Green Book, Jazz Venues

Ridge Cotton Club

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Opened in the 1930s and listed in the The Negro Motorist Green Book, the Ridge Cotton Club shows the influence of Harlem and the Cotton Club. And like the legendary Harlem nightspot, it was probably controlled by the mob.

Two of the original owners, Morris Brodsky and Harry Hirsch, died within days of each other in January 1949 following “injuries inflicted by an assailant.”

The Elmer Snowden Trio played here in April 1946.

Green Book, Jazz Venues

Watts’ Zanzibar

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Watts’ Zanzibar was located on the “Golden Strip.” In the 1940s, the house band was led by tenor saxophonist Jimmy Oliver who later played with Bootsie Barnes, the Heath Brothers and John Coltrane, and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie.

In an essay in “Lost Shrines of Jazz,” noted author and scholar James G. Spady wrote:

Perhaps no institution in the city was more responsible for Philly’s bop revolution than a North Philly club named Watts’ Zanzibar, located at 1833 W. Columbia Avenue (now named Cecil B. Moore Avenue, in honor of a black attorney and 1960s Civil Rights leader in Philadelphia). It was recognized as the bop spot, the home of modern African American culture. Sonically and sartorially hip, it both nurtured and reflected bop ethics and aesthetics. The very name reflected the old and the new: Africa and America, Watts’ Zanzibar. The proprietors were brothers Richard and Robert Watts.

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Green Book, Hotel Carlyle, Jazz Venues

Ebony Lounge

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The Ebony Lounge was located in the lower level of the Chesterfield Hotel which was owned by Ernest and Evelyn Harris.

Alonzo Kittrels of the Philadelphia Tribune reminisced:

[T]he Chesterfield Hotel, a landmark that deserves its own back-in-the-day column, given its significance in the lives of Black people. It was particularly important in the lives of the performers at the nearby Uptown Theater. This hotel was where many performers stayed while appearing at this venue.

Ebony Lounge - SCOOP USA

In a March 28, 1960 conversation with celebrated jazz journalist Ralph J. Gleason, bassist Percy Heath reminisced about his start as a professional musician:

But I remember when Red Garland did come to Philadelphia he was singing and playing “Billie’s Bounce” and “Now’s the Time” and we hadn’t heard those things, and he was sort of an authority on Charlie Parker tunes at that time. But there were an awful lot of promising musicians around Philadelphia. I really started with a trio. At that time we used to play in little cocktail bars and there was hotel there, the Philadelphia Chesterfield Hotel, they had a lounge. We played in there quite a bit and then we’d go around to Wilmington, Delaware, and play some club down there.

Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews is available on Amazon.com.

Green Book, Jazz Venues
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Morton Emerson opened Emerson’s in 1934. The nightspot was listed in The Negro Motorist Travel Guide. According to The John Coltrane Reference, John Coltrane and Percy Heath stopped by Emerson’s to see saxophonist Lester Young on June 17, 1948.

Billie Holiday’s gig at the South Philly jazz club on March 14, 1959 — four months before her death — is the setting for the Broadway play, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill.”

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill - Playbill

Audra McDonald won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play.

Also known as Emerson’s Café and Emerson’s Sunset Grille, Emerson’s closed circa 1960.

Cultural Heritage, Cultural Heritage Preservation, Green Book, Historic Preservation, Jazz Venues

Bijou Café

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The Bijou Café opened on October 4, 1972. The club was in the former location of the legendary Showboat. The Bijou hosted jazz greats such as Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Bill Evans. Grover Washington, Jr. recorded “Live at the Bijou” in May 1977.

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, the Bijou was Philadelphia’s premier showcase for up-and-coming artists, including Barry Manilow, Angela Bofill and U2.

Longtime radio personality T. Morgan recalled:

The jazz lineups were nothing short of spectacular and the comedy was even better! The National Lampoon Show with future superstars John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and Lorraine Newman all appeared together. Another comedy troupe, Firesign Theater also appeared. Billy Crystal was an opening act four times and a headliners three times. His impersonation of Muhammad Ali was a big crowd favorite. Albert Brooks, Richard Pryor, Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture, Steve Martin, Jerry Seinfeld and Dick Gregory all keep the audiences amused.

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