Branching Out From the Cosmopolitan   

A jazz combination, or ‘combo’ is characterized by one melody with solos passed around to the different instruments that comprise a band; each tells a different tale of the same story, branching across sounds and tempos but always returning to the same motif. Taking this to heart, we’d like to introduce you to Discussions on Branching Out From the Cosmopolitan Club, an amalgamation of discussions on research about Akron’s buried legacies during the 1930s-1960s. Our central motif details the Cosmopolitan Club, and its hidden glory on a street damned by perception. It bloomed with business, music, and culture. The Cosmopolitan is our rhythm section - our drums, bass, and piano to accompany the melody of topics and stories; a club that held a significant presence on Howard street’s jazz scene.  

Several characters on Howard Street are worthy of discussion- Clifford Johnson, taken from us too young, and Albert M. Damon- better known as “Pork Chops”- who lived at the site where the Cosmopolitan Club would later be established. We'll discuss the most important figures and themes that surfaced during our research, keeping in mind that our goal from the beginning has been to provide the beginning to a more whole and unbiased narrative. Regarding the complex animal of perception in this arena, we also had several brief discussions with another class group, who took on analyzing the presence of LGBTQ+ Akronites in the Howard Street area. The attitudes we encountered in our research were that most people looked down upon the Black community that existed on in the North Howard area, and especially the LGBTQ+ individuals that worked and lived there. We will touch on this in different sections of this project, and the LGBTQ+ group's full project can be accessed here for further research; please consider checking them out!

We will also be discussing the importance of the late Akron Armory, and how it served as a big piece of city image; this provides a sense of helpful contrast to understanding what Howard Street was to those who did not frequent it or understand what happened there. If the Armory was something Akron was proud of and Howard Street much the opposite, this is a careful reexamination of what history overlooked, and the acknowledgement that Howard Street was remarkably valuable—especially in the wake of the Innerbelt’s destruction of it. This is one of our melodies, characterized by a trumpet’s careful brightness to the next piece of the story, a darker, sadder, baritone saxophone.   

The presence of entertainment on Howard Street and in downtown Akron is extremely important, and we’ve made room to briefly discuss several institutions, including a restaurant called the Smoke Pit that started on Maple St. before migrating to North Howard. Each offshoot serves as a different arrangement of tones and stories pieced together by the same undertone. Similarly, each individual in our group spent several months researching these places in order to contribute to the Green Book Cleveland project, linked on the last page of this site- each of us has carefully connected our research in a way that we hopes is demonstrative and honoring of Black stories. The green book site is a project inspired by the historic Green Book and gives profiles of places where Black Americans were able to visit safely in a post Jim Crow era. If you take anything from this project, go then to the Green Book and take more!

A Disclaimer On Language and Content: 

 The presence of harmful language and attitudes was present during the period Akron's Howard Street was in its prime (1930s-60s) and is not something we took lightly. The assessment of those subjects as relevant to the narrative we are honoring was considered extensively, and material considered harmful was left out so as not to further tarnish what remains.