Cotton club

The Cotton Club was a famous night club in New York City that operated during Prohibition. While the club featured many of the greatest African American entertainers of the era, such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, The Nicholas Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Ethel Waters, it generally denied admission to blacks. During its heyday, it served as a chic meeting spot in the heart of Harlem, featuring regular "Celebrity…

Cotton club

One of hundreds of thousands of free digital items from The New York Public Library.

Cab Calloway performs at Harlem's Cotton Club in 1935.

The Cotton Club might be Harlem's most famous surviving jazz venue, but it was also the neighborhood's most notorious especially after WWI.

Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, 1940's.

St. Louis Cotton Club Band. Photograph by Block Brothers Studio, ca. 1925. Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections. Block Brothers Studio Collection. N27534.

Thanks to an animated map acquired by Yale's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we can get a sense of the vibrant nightlife of Harlem during this time in history. This original pen-and-brush map was drawn by Elmer Simms Campbell, one of the first commercially successful, and syndicated, African-American cartoonists in the country.

Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club!

A roundup of the most iconic nightclubs in New York City.