Up In Harlem

While many of Harlem’s residential streets would be recognizable to someone who knew them 60 years ago, many of the places that once supplied its cultural scaffolding are disappearing. The original Cotton Club, the legendary nightclub, is gone. So are the Savoy and the Golden Gate, clubs that thrived during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, and all but the facade of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot. The Renaissance Ballroom, Small’s Paradise nightclub, the Victoria Theater—all were crowded in Harlem’s heyday but are now abandoned and decrepit.