Nightclubs

Manhattan's nightlife was legendary. With the upsurge of income and shortage of goods on which to spend those extra dollars, clubs were at their peak in the war years and right after. Even so, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers had never stepped foot in a nightclub and most of those who had been to one had only visited once or twice for a special date or occasion, maybe after a wartime wedding too hastily arranged on an Army pass to have a traditional reception. Much of the crowd at the best known places were well-heeled tourists or, even more likely, out-of-town businessmen being entertained on an expense account. For most New Yorkers, nightclubs were every bit as exotic as they were to residents of Peoria They were a vicarious thrill experienced through newspaper columns. radio shows and movies. If they went out dancing, it was more likely to be to an outer borough ballroom, a union hall, church basement or a community center than a true nightclub. For live entertainment they went to the shows at the midtown movie palaces not to places where they had to get all dressed up, endure snotty waiters and pay exorbitant prices for bad food and watered-down drinks. On the other hand, if fiction of the period was to be believed, attractive, ambitious young women who came to work in Manhattan offices would simply die to be invited to a nightclub, even by an unattractive, perhaps married man, and would have one special dress set aside for the possibility, which might be topped off with a borrowed fur if the situation presented itself.

To some of the veterans of the Prohibition-era speakeasies and the high glam scene of the Thirties when men were expected to wear tails and women long evening gowns, the nightclub scene of the Forties had become too common. In their highly cultivated opinion, too many places were frequented by too many "blackmarket" types, which seems to be code for Italians and Jews, at least those of a certain "type" and cheap floozies. Most clubs barred or discouraged African American patrons along with other dark skinned people.

On the upper end of the scale were the snooty, exclusive joints. According to NY Times magazine story in February 1946, the four pillars of true café society were the Stork Club, El Morocco, 21 and The Colony. The last two were restaurants without music. The food and entertainment at the Stork Club and El Morocco were notably mediocre or worse. If you were truly Somebody, you gained entrance to the Cub Room at the Stork Club or the Champagne Room of El Morocco, where there was no entertainment. Mere mortals found it difficult to make it past the doormen. A pecking order was honored in the seating arrangements. Society columnist Lucius Beebe pondered the wartime seating conundrum: Who got the better table, the high-ranking military nobody from nowhere or the junior lieutenant from one of the best Park Avenue families? Beebe firmly voted for the lieutenant. The Ivy League offspring of the social elite often were given free admission. According to a John O'Hara story that appeared in The New Yorker that April, the regulars knew that ringside seats were for big-spending parvenus.The social game was the real reason to frequent these places. The principal amusement was gawking at celebrities, even for the celebrities.

The El Morocco crowd considered the Stork Club somewhat tacky. To the Stork Club crowd, the cavernous places like the Copacabana and Latin Quarter were beyond the pale.They were places where garment district, wholesale and manufacturing executives entertained their out-of-town buyers and furriers from Brooklyn or Newark took their wives or girlfriends for a night out. These places had big name entertainment and flashy floor shows with a long roster of acts, the equivalent of a top line vaudeville show of earlier years or of the Ed Sullivan show on Fifties television with singers, bands, comedians, acrobats, jugglers, ballroom dancers and show girls all trotted out during the course of an evening with dancing in-between. Other somewhat smaller midtown nightclubs offered entertainment or dancing. The intimate boites like Riband Bleu, the Blue Angel and Tony's, where the entertainment was the draw and there was no dance floor, catered to hard-drinking celebrities and show people and could be as exclusive and expensive as Elmos, which is what those in the know called El Morocco.

The uptown hotels like the Plaza had supper clubs where piano players and chanteuses performed the music of Porter and Gershwin and society orchestras played fox trots and waltzes for well-dressed. well-heeled patrons. Teens and college students crammed into the hotel ballrooms in the midtown hotels like the Hotel Pennsylvania to jive to the the big swing bands. As an NYU college student, future food critic Mimi Sheraton was among the teenage partiers. Fifty-second Street was lined with jazz clubs where be-bop was the rage and drug use was a problem. The Village had its share of clubs as well; among the notables were Cafe Society and the Village Vanguard. In the outer reaches of the city ballrooms thrived where admission was only a quarter. Organizations from the Communists and unions to the Catholics and fraternal organizations also sponsored dances. But there were also nightclubs in the Bronx and Brooklyn.

The New Yorker listed the top nightclub attractions in its Going On About Town guide in the April 20 issue and carried a number of ads for other night spots. Several of the big West Side nightclubs, as well as the less expensive ballrooms, advertised in the Sunday News and the Mirror.