Photo: www.biography.com
In 1916, when I enrolled at Public School 89 in Harlem as a third grader, the center of black life in New York City was 135th Street -- not 125th Street, as it is now. Eighty years ago, 125th was mostly a Jewish area and had very few blacks.
Just one block from my school, at 7th Avenue and 135th Street, was the Lafayette Theater, which was the main theater that blacks attended. It had not only motion pictures, but vaudeville shows too. It was white-owned and run, but all the entertainers were black. Sometimes it would have serious drama instead of musicals.
In front of the Lafayette was a tree that was known by black entertainers all over the United States as the Tree of Hope. If they had long periods of unemployment, they would come by and kiss the tree and rub its bark, hoping they would get a break. And so many of them got jobs that the name stuck.
Blacks were always trying to work the Palace Theater downtown. That was the lead vaudeville house in the whole nation. Any entertainer who played the Palace, black or white, had made it on the big time.
Around the corner from the Lafayette was a motion picture house, the Lincoln Theater. I think once in a while it had stage acts. There were no talking pictures then, so during the movie, they always had somebody play the piano or organ.
The Lincoln Theater is where Fats Waller first started playing the pipe organ on weekends, when he was 12 years of age. He was a few grades ahead of me, but he was there at the school, the same time I was going.
read more: http://www.redhotjazz.com/fatsarticle.html
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