Dreams of a Harlem Jazz Rebirth
As another evening falls, the Lenox Lounge sits dim and lonely. Commuters pour out of the 125th Street subway station and onto Lenox Avenue, past its padlocked door. At Ginny’s Supper Club across the street, a mostly black crowd of men in suits and women in heels sips and sways as a band turns out a haunting rendition of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.”
It is said that Coltrane once blew his sax at the Lenox Lounge, which kept regulars, downtowners and tourists coming back for 70 years, even through the neighborhood’s bleak times. Now, with Harlem resurgent, only its remains are on display: its Art Deco finishes, familiar red paneling and famous sign have all been stripped away.
The Lenox Lounge shut down on Dec. 31 after a bitter lease dispute between the club’s owner and his landlord. The space was supposed to reopen within weeks under new management. But overnight, Alvin Reed, the bar’s operator, removed the fixtures and furnishings and took them to a nearby storefront, where, he has said, he plans to reopen. That prompted a $50 million lawsuit from Ricky Edmonds, the landlord, demanding the fixtures be returned. Their next meeting before a judge, to present a settlement or set a court date, is scheduled for April 4.
For the moment, at least, plans for two versions of the Lenox Lounge are unfolding in parallel: one in the storied original location; the other up the street, with the lounge’s fabled interior and trademarked name.
They will have company. Farther south, on West 118th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, another investor plans to reopen the legendary jazz haunt Minton’s Playhouse, which before a recent short-lived run had been closed for almost as much of its raucous 75-year history as it had been open.
Maybe it’s a long shot. But within the neighborhood’s current economic remix, with its new condos and destination restaurants, three businessmen have latched on to the same dream at the same time: reviving a piece of vintage Harlem with a jumping, jamming jazz spot, that this time will outlive the past.
The Lenox Lounge opened in 1942, just south of the intersection of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street.
Mr. Reed and his family moved to Harlem from Virginia a few years later, when he was 6. Decades later, in 1988, Mr. Reed, a jazz lover and retired police officer with property in other boroughs, bought the club. He paid its previous owner $85,000 and signed a new lease.
With his own investment and loans from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, Mr. Reed restored the interior with geometric floor tiles and zebra-print wallpaper — and brought back live jazz.
“When I originally took it over, the Lenox Lounge wasn’t nowhere near the stature it is now,” Mr. Reed, 73, said in January. He then memorialized some of Harlem’s long vanished clubs: the Savoy, the Baby Grand, Smalls. These were intimate places peopled by black patrons, largely kept out of the segregated nightclubs downtown and Harlem’s own Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington and his Jungle Band performed and dancers in faux African dress entertained those looking for an exotic experience.
The early 1940s was a high point for jazz in Harlem, where young and brilliant musicians like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke and Coltrane jammed and experimented. At Minton’s, they created the genre known as bebop. “I wanted to try to bring some of that back,” said Mr. Reed, “bring life back to Harlem.”
Part of the Lenox Lounge’s charm was its atmosphere. It was cozy and unpretentious, with duct tape covering tears in some of the seats. Old heads in suits, the after-work crowd and tourists from the Bronx or Switzerland crowded the bar, all friends for the night.
But Mr. Reed and his landlord, Mr. Edmonds, never really got along, said Sharron Cannon, the former manager at the lounge. Tensions, she said, led to standoffs. She recalled a situation over pest control. “It was definitely a haven for rats,” she said of the lounge. While the rodents ran wild, she said, Mr. Edmonds and Mr. Reed pointed fingers at each other. Mr. Reed and Ms. Cannon, who co-owns the trademark on the Lenox Lounge name, have parted ways.
In the club’s last days, Mr. Reed told patrons he could not afford the escalating rent. But what exactly felled the Lenox Lounge remains unclear. During negotiations to renew the lease, Mr. Edmonds asked Mr. Reed to find a business partner to help him renovate the space, get the proper licenses for live music and stay current with his payments. Mr. Reed had been struggling to pay the monthly rent of $9,925, Mr. Edmonds said, despite the boom in the neighborhood’s night life at places like Corner Social and Red Rooster.
During one round of lease negotiations, Mr. Reed agreed to pay $15,000 a month for 2013, according to a letter addressed to Mr. Edmonds from Mr. Reed’s lawyer. However, Mr. Reed wanted an “escape clause,” that would allow him to cancel the lease with two months’ written notice and no further liability.
“How does that preserve the space?” Mr. Edmonds, 56, asked in January.
The two eventually agreed that Mr. Reed would vacate the premises by noon on Jan. 1. A new tenant, Richie Notar, known for his role in building the Nobu sushi chain, would take over the premises later that day. Mr. Notar had planned to polish a few things and then reopen in a few weeks. The same style, but because of the trademark, a new name.
But around 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, according to court papers filed by Mr. Edmonds, about a dozen workers hired by Mr. Reed began “stripping the premises bare” as Mr. Edmonds watched from the street.
The workers, the lawsuit states, grabbed the red-metal panels on the front facade, the distinctive glass-paneled doors, the etched mirrors, the finned-glass light fixtures, the C-shaped banquettes, the bar counter and other fixtures, and fed them to two waiting trucks.
“What he’s done is take over everything and take it to another spot, and he clearly cannot do that,” Mr. Edmonds said in January. “We clearly have a lease that states he was supposed to leave all that stuff in there. And we’re going to do everything in our means to get it back.”
In February, Mr. Edmonds filed the lawsuit, demanding that Mr. Reed return an inventory of 26 listed items — and pay $50 million in damages.
Last week, Mr. Reed’s lawyer, Tyreta Foster, referred questions about the suit to her client. Mr. Reed would only say that he owned the business and “they’re trying to take it away from me.”
In an interview a few days into 2013, Mr. Reed said that he planned to duplicate as much of the Lenox Lounge as he could in a shuttered beauty salon on Lenox Avenue. It was a smaller, two-level space where, he said, people would be able to hang out and listen to good music, in a setting that would be “less commercial and more authentic.”
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
Richard Parsons, top, who plans to resurrect Minton’s, and Richie Notar, who plans to reopen the Lenox Lounge space.
“We got the Lenox Lounge sign” that is going to go up, he said, and it is going to “look almost as it looked before.”
“I like bad news quick,” Richie Notar said in late February, wearing a wry smile with a charcoal pinstripe suit and striped shirt, as he sat inside Harlow, his new restaurant in Midtown.
Mr. Notar, 52, with thinning brown hair, was surrounded by a team of contractors, architects, designers and demolition specialists. Blueprints, open laptops and inked notepads were decked on the table — renovations were going forward, fixtures or no fixtures. In addition to the club in the old Lenox Lounge space, Mr. Notar was planning to open a bakery next door with Dwight Henry of New Orleans, the baker turned actor made famous by the Oscar-nominated film “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”
A native of Jamaica, Queens, Mr. Notar started out when he was a teenager as a shirtless busboy at Studio 54. He recently left his role as a managing partner in the Nobu chain, which has branded its Japanese cuisine from downtown to Dubai, and set out on his own. He can drop A-list names of musicians, actors and pornography stars.
Almost a year and a half ago, he learned from a posting on the blog Eater that the Lenox Lounge was available. When he walked through the space, quiet and still during the morning hours, “I felt like I was walking into a movie,” he recalled.
Now, in light of the lawsuit, he said with a laugh, “It’s like buying a car, and you come back and the seats are gone, the tires are gone.”
But as he later said to his team: “Maybe he did us a favor,” referring to Mr. Reed. “Now, we’re able to think about this in a different way.”
As far as the space, Mr. Notar said he still planned to keep to the nostalgic, Art Deco atmosphere: “I like those little love seats for two,” he said, remembering the Lenox Lounge of old. But he will add a bit of modern sheen: fine food, pitch-perfect sound and what he called “a smattering of surprises.”
“I really want to get back to that music-centric era,” said Mr. Notar, “where people say: I want to sing there.”
Getting the music right might be the hardest part.
Anyone trying to resurrect a jazz haunt has to face the question of what the music means to Harlem today, said Loren Schoenberg, the artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, on East 126th Street.
“There’s a lot of ghosts in that neighborhood,” Mr. Schoenberg said, “and these places are trying to capture what was a very complicated past. The challenge is not to romanticize it with some corny representation.”
Jazz in its heyday, Mr. Schoenberg said, was not a throwback — it was vital, young, popular music.
“It wasn’t that Parker and Ellington were saying, ‘Here’s this music from a half a century ago, with this complicated structure, that you can’t dance to, and be quiet and listen,” he said.
“On the other hand,” he added, “this music is too good to throw away.”
Mr. Notar wants his club to be much more than a nostalgia operation.
He envisions a place local musicians will call home, a place that an artist in town to promote a new album would check out — and maybe jump onto the bandstand for a few songs at the end of the night.
No, he doesn’t have a name yet. But he has the revered space and, he said, a deepened connection to Harlem. And he believes he can take his refitted version of the Lenox Lounge brand around the globe.
“I know people get insular and protective about it,” Mr. Notar said, “but let me tell you, the world is talking about Harlem.”
Change doesn’t have to be a bad thing for Harlem, he added, “As long as it still has that flavor.”
But first, he has to open. As the meeting wound down, Mr. Notar leaned in and asked his team: “Roughly, give me an estimate of when I can serve my first beer.”
He had hoped the answer would be within a few weeks. Think August, they told him. There were the grease trap, the sprinkler system, pest control, whether those remaining faux-leather seats were fire retardant — and the list went on.
Richard Parsons owns a jazz collection that towers, swells and spans. It is a mass of thousands of CDs and about 1,500 pounds of black vinyl. He organizes it with a database that can tell him, for example, who is on bass on any particular cut.
For the retired former head of two Fortune 500 companies, Citicorp and Time Warner, his decision to reopen Minton’s Playhouse, on a dull stretch of West 118th Street, came easy.
Jazz had first grabbed hold of him as a teenager growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The night of his senior prom, he said, he took his date to the chic Hickory House restaurant in Manhattan to hear the Billy Taylor Trio.
Sitting in his office one recent afternoon, Mr. Parsons, a stout man of 65, remembered that night as his “first true adolescent experience.”
When he returned to the city in 1977, after graduating from law school and working in Albany and Washington, the economy had sunk, and dragged real estate values with it. Many celebrated jazz spots had been ravaged.
As chairman of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone in the mid-’90s, Mr. Parsons worked on an economic effort to revive a withering Harlem. The plan radiated from the Apollo Theater, which was struggling after bankruptcy. “First we had to bring the Apollo back to life,” Mr. Parsons said. “Then, get people up here to eat and shop and stabilize the neighborhood.”
Development has spread from 125th Street down to 116th, with a new art-house theater, and to Frederick Douglass Boulevard, with its million-dollar apartments, a sushi restaurant and small shops.
And now, Minton’s.
One brisk morning about three years ago, Mr. Parsons, who is board chairman of the Jazz Foundation of America, was scouting the storefront of the old Cecil Hotel, a single-room-occupancy building for adults who had been homeless. He and a longtime friend, Alexander Smalls, the former owner of the restaurant Cafe Beulah, were looking for a project to take on in Harlem. Mr. Parsons made his way around the corner, where he saw the ghostly blue sign, spelling out Minton’s.
They had to have it, he told Mr. Smalls.
“You know who the pianist was?” asked Mr. Parsons, his voice rising with excitement. “Thelonious Monk!”
“It isn’t just a place where guys played,” he explained. “It is a place where a genre of music was created. This is history. This is jazz history. And this is going to make what we’re doing known around the world.”
The reopened Minton’s Playhouse, Mr. Parsons said, will have tablecloths, fine china and Mr. Smalls’s brand of Southern revival cooking on the menu. Straight-ahead jazz standards like “The Nearness of You” will play with what Mr. Parsons calls “super duper sound.” He also plans to bring back the notion of a house band, with gigs for some of the aged musicians the jazz foundation helps with rent and medical care, many of whom still live in Harlem.
Then, on Fridays and Saturdays, as midnight creeps in, the rhythm section and the high horn players, he said, will “bring the funk.” Tables will be pulled back, and the floor opened up, “and the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of a nightclub.”
The Cecil, a restaurant he is planning to open next door, will be a lighter, hipper Afro-Asian-American brasserie, offering foods from the African diaspora.
If all goes well, the sibling restaurants will open by fall. And since Mr. Parsons is using his own money for now, he also controls the vision.
There are still a few other places in Harlem to soak up live jazz, like Paris Blues, Chocolat, Ginny’s and the Shrine. And Mr. Parsons admitted that some have questioned whether jazz could work on a deserted street, an avenue away from the nearest subway. But, he said, he senses a sure thing.
“There are people in this town who remember the days of elegance, and the days of style and class,” he said. “And they love jazz.”
“Jazz,” he added, “like other types of music, it changes, it morphs, and it finds new audiences.”
By KIA GREGORY