The Palm Cafe at 209 West 125th Street. The palm was a one of the most well known jazz establishment in Harlem. The above photo from 1949 (click to enlarge) shows the semi-circular awning of the café (see arrow) and one can barely make out “Palm Cafe” printed at its circumference. There’s neon signage above the said awning but its hard to make out from the angle of the photo peering north-west along 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell/7th Avenue and Frederick Douglas Blvd.,/8th Avenue.
The Palm Cafe was great, the foxtrot footwork of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson outside, Diahann Carroll is pictured here during a 1953 radio interview with Leigh Kamman at the Palm Cafe in Harlem.
The Harlem minister Rev. Robert Royal managed there, Dorothy Kilgallen, Harry Belafonte, Art Carney, Sidney Poitier, Langston Hughes, Jimi Hendrix, Millie Jackson visited, was amongst the many notables that had their start at this famous club.
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I can’t say when the Palm Cafe closed, but Chester Himes wrote in garish prose in his book “For Love of Imabelle” (1957) that the Palm Cafe was “full of smooth Harlem hustlers with shiny straightened hair, dressed in lurid elegance, along with their tightly draped queens, chorus girls, and models — which meant anything — sparkling with iridescent glass jewelry, rolling dark mascaraed eyes, flashing crimson fingernails, smiling with pearl-white teeth encircled by purple-red lips, exhibiting the hot excitement that money could buy.”
What a great qoute. Thanks for adding it to the post.
HW
THe Palm Cafe officially closed in 1978. My cousins owned it from the 1920s through the 1960s. I am actually heading to NYC in August to do further research on this branch of my family from Italy and would love to collarborate on some details or any informaiotn known about the Palm Cafe.