Smalls Paradise

Overview

The longest-running nightclub in Harlem: the only major Black-owned and racially integrated room of the Harlem Renaissance era, opened in a basement on Seventh Avenue by Edwin Smalls in 1925, home to Charlie Johnson's Paradise Orchestra for a decade, open for sixty-one years of Black cultural and political life before closing in 1986.

Smalls Paradise occupied a basement space at 2294½ Seventh Avenue, opened October 26, 1925, with a gala of nearly 1,500 guests by Edwin Alexander Smalls (1882–1974), a Charleston, South Carolina native and reported grandson of the Civil War hero and U.S. Congressman Robert Smalls, who had already operated the Sugar Cane Club nearby since 1917. At a moment when the Cotton Club and Connie's Inn admitted Black performers but required white-only or white-primary audiences, Smalls ran an integrated room and served liquor during Prohibition, with patrons bringing their own or buying bootleg from the waiters. Its floor-show model was singular: waiters danced the Charleston and foxtrot, roller-skated while balancing trays, and vocalized during the shows, the service staff as co-performers. While most Harlem rooms closed between 3 and 4 a.m., Smalls stayed open all night, offering breakfast dances with a full floor show beginning at 6 a.m. Charlie Johnson and his Paradise Orchestra served as the house band for ten years from opening night, a rotating ensemble that at various points featured Jabbo Smith, Benny Carter, Jimmy Harrison, Sidney De Paris, and — in some accounts — Sidney Bechet; the orchestra recorded five sessions between 1925 and 1929, constituting a primary audio record of the room's early era. Sam Wooding is reported to have been heard at the club in 1925 by the Russian impresario Leonidoff and recruited for the *Chocolate Kiddies* European revue, one of the first major jazz exports to the continent; the revue opened in Berlin in 1925, so the date sits awkwardly against the club's October opening. Billie Holiday's first professional audition (famously unsuccessful because she did not know what key she sang in) was held at the club in the early 1930s. In 1930 the club began airing radio broadcasts twice weekly on WMCA. W.E.B. Du Bois celebrated his 83rd birthday at the club on February 23, 1951, with a party co-sponsored by Albert Einstein, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Paul Robeson. After thirty years as owner, Ed Smalls sold the club in late 1955 to the disc jockey Tommy Smalls, no relation, known on the air as "Dr. Jive"; Tommy held a grand opening gala on December 13, 1955, attended by Willie Mays, and began broadcasting his WWRL radio program from the venue. He positioned the club as an early rock-and-roll destination alongside Alan Freed, but by the late 1950s business had declined. In 1961, basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and Harlem businessman Pete McDougal purchased the club, renaming it Big Wilt's Smalls Paradise and shifting the music policy from jazz to rhythm and blues. Chamberlain spent up to 18 hours a day there as celebrity host; Ray Charles and Redd Foxx were among the early bookings. The Tuesday-night Twist contests began in December 1961; in the year after they started the club recorded over 250,000 guests, and the contests drew BBC-TV camera crews and United Nations delegates. James Baldwin's publisher hosted a party there for *Another Country* during this period. Jimmy Smith recorded two live albums at the venue in November 1957 (*Groovin' at Smalls' Paradise* on Blue Note) recorded live in the room during the Dr. Jive years. By the early 1970s the club required a clean-up of drug dealing on the premises; programming shifted again toward soul acts (Jerry Butler, The Dells) and a dance floor room called the Vilmac Room was built for those who wanted to dance to a disco beat. In 1983 a relaunch as the New Smalls Paradise broadened the format to include craft shows and political gatherings alongside dancing. The club closed in 1986 as the longest continuously operating nightclub in Harlem, sixty-one years. After closure the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the nonprofit arm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church under Rev. Calvin Butts III, purchased and renovated the building and leased it to the New York City Board of Education; the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change opened on-site in 2004, erasing the physical club space entirely. A menu from the club's Malcolm X years survives in museum collections. Robert Smalls, from whom Edwin Smalls claimed descent, had commandeered the Confederate steamer CSS Planter and delivered it (with himself and his family aboard) to the Union Navy on May 13, 1862, opening the second half of a life ending in five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina between 1875 and 1887; the reported family connection ties the Harlem club to that lineage. No New York City landmark designation is recorded for the building or the site; the corner at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 135th Street sits outside any designated historic district. The Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change, which opened at 2294½ Seventh Avenue in 2004 under the New York City Department of Education after the Abyssinian Development Corporation's renovation, occupies the footprint where the basement club once ran; nothing of the basement room survived the conversion.