Leviticus

Overview

The first Black-owned disco in Midtown Manhattan (opened November 1974 by the eight-member cooperative The Best of Friends, Inc.) drawing a primarily middle-class Black professional clientele at 45 West 33rd Street for fourteen years.

Leviticus opened in November 1974 at 45 West 33rd Street, making it the first Black-owned nightclub in Midtown Manhattan, a designation confirmed by its founders across multiple published accounts. It was built, owned, and operated by The Best of Friends, Inc., an eight-member cooperative whose principals were Tony Cooper, Danny Berry, Charles 'CP' Perry, Mal Woolfolk, Harry Felder, Wayne Scarbrough, Andre Smith, and Noel Hankin. The group went on to own several other rooms: Justine's on West 38th Street, Bogard's on East 48th Street, Orpheus on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, and Lucifer's on Linden Boulevard in Queens, a multi-venue ownership model unusual in any segment of the New York nightlife economy of the era. Leviticus attracted a primarily middle-class African American clientele, many of them Midtown workers, and operated as a disco from its opening through the late 1970s; live musical acts were added as interest in pure dancing shifted. In doing so, the club occupied a social and economic position (affluent, professional, predominantly Black, Midtown-anchored) that neither the downtown disco narrative (Garage, Loft, Saint) nor the Bronx hip-hop story comfortably accommodates. Celebrity visitors documented in the club's history include Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Stevie Wonder, the fashion designer Valentino, and members of the New York Knicks; radio personalities including Vaughn Harper, Frankie Crocker, G. Keith Alexander, and Ken 'Spyder' Webb were regulars. Leviticus ran continuously for fourteen years, closing in October 1988. The club's location — steps from Herald Square and a short walk from Penn Station — gave it a commuter accessibility that few Manhattan nightclubs shared. For Black middle-class professionals returning from or heading into Midtown offices, Leviticus was reachable in ways that the Loft's Broadway walk-up or the Garage's King Street industrial block were not; the address was itself a form of social positioning. The WBLS 107.5 FM axis reinforced this geography: Frankie Crocker, who as the station's program director through the mid-to-late 1970s had remade WBLS into the flagship of New York Black urban radio, used Leviticus as part of his social world; Vaughn Harper's late-night 'Quiet Storm' format and G. Keith Alexander's programming drew the same professional audience the club was designed for. Beyond Leviticus, The Best of Friends, Inc. extended their ownership model to four additional rooms across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, creating what may be the most geographically distributed Black-owned nightlife enterprise in New York during the period. The cooperative's fourteen-year continuous run at 45 West 33rd Street — spanning the disco peak, its commercial collapse, and the early years of house music — is one of the longer recorded chapters of Black entrepreneurship in the city's nightlife economy. The historical record of Leviticus rests primarily on Noel Hankin's own writings, published via LinkedIn; no independent contemporaneous press archive equivalent to the disco-era coverage of the Saint or the Garage has been identified. The club's closure in October 1988 was not accompanied by major retrospective coverage, a gap that reflects the marginalization of Black-owned midtown venues in the disco narrative then being consolidated. The building at 45 West 33rd Street was absorbed into the commercial redevelopment of the Penn Station corridor; no physical trace of the Leviticus space has been identified in current surveys of the address. The Best of Friends, Inc. cooperative's five-venue structure—Leviticus, Justine's, Bogard's, Orpheus, and Lucifer's across three boroughs—was described by Hankin as deliberate strategic planning, a multi-venue enterprise operating at the scale of groups that ran white-owned venues during the same period.