Untitled - Skilliter

402 African American criticism
New York, and it was on the train to New York that she first met Tom (40; ch. 2).
West 158th Street in Manhattan is the location of the apartment Tom keeps for
his trysts with Myrtle (32; ch. 2), which means that their taxi has to pass right
by Harlem, if not pass through it, to get to their destination. Moreover, we’re
told that he frequently takes his mistress to “popular restaurants” in the city,
to the chagrin of his “acquaintances” who see them there (28; ch. 2). Clearly,
Tom spends a good deal of time in Manhattan. Nick and Gatsby even run into
him in the Forty-second Street restaurant where they meet for lunch and where
Nick is introduced to Meyer Wolfsheim (73; ch. 4). And certainly Gatsby visits
New York City to meet with Wolfsheim. In addition, the confrontation scene
between Tom and Gatsby, one of the novel’s pivotal events, occurs in the Plaza
Hotel in Manhattan (132; ch. 7). Even most of Gatsby’s party guests (44; ch. 3),
as well as the “crates of oranges and lemons” (43; ch. 3) that garnish their hors
d’oeuvres and drinks, come from New York.
How, then, can narrator Nick Carraway and his friends have missed Harlem?
Harlem’s nightclubs, which offered such jazz greats as Eubie Blake, Fats Waller,
Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway (Lewis 91,
120, 183, 210), attracted white people from all over the city and beyond. Nightspots
like Barron’s Little Savoy, the Douglass Club (Lewis 28), Connie’s Inn
(Stovall 29), and the Exclusive Club (Stovall 44), among others, could boast
among their clientele “white debutantes, socialites, politicians, [and] performers”
(Stovall 29). And Harlem’s theaters offered the talents of such time-honored
actors as Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (Lewis
120). As Jervis Anderson puts it, “Harlem was Manhattan’s capital of gaiety and
amusement. . . . [T]here was no livelier place in all of New York City, especially
after dark. Nightly, thousands of white visitors—most from downtown, some
from other parts of the country, a few from cities abroad—made their way to
Harlem” (139). Among the throngs of ordinary folk and wealthy whites who
visited Harlem’s nightspots, David Levering Lewis reports, were the very famous,
including such notables of the period as John and Ethel Barrymore, Charlie
Chaplin (105–06), the famous composer Maurice Ravel (173), George Gershwin
(183), Jimmy Durante, Joan Crawford, Benny Goodman, bandleaders Tommy
and Jimmy Dorsey, future mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, Mae West,
Tallulah Bankhead, and Emily Vanderbilt (209).
In fact, when the African American musical comedy Shuffle Along opened, it
took all of New York City by storm. Written, produced, and performed exclusively
by black people, the show appeared in the long unused Sixty-third Street
Theatre, which was considered rather far uptown for Broadway audiences to
attend. Nevertheless, “[w]ithin a few weeks Shuffle Along made the Sixty-third
Street Theatre one of the best-known houses in town and made it necessary for
the Traffic Department to declare Sixty-third Street a one-way thoroughfare” to