The Opening of the Savoy, the Most Inclusive Club in Harlem, 100 Years Ago

March 12, 2026, marks the centenary of opening night at the palatial, opulent Savoy Ballroom, which occupied an entire block of Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets in Harlem. In its thirty-two years, 1926-1958, the Savoy would be the site of band battles and dance contests, where the Lindy hop was popularized, and where Count Basie and Noble Sissle had residencies. It saw landmarks in the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, and Chick Webb, whose theme song “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” written by Edgar Sampson in 1933, became a jazz standard. These musical legends underwrote the Savoy’s legacy, but the club’s significance for jazz and dance history rests equally on how it broke ground for inclusivity in New York City’s entertainment scene. A hundred years ago, the Savoy was the city’s first major dance hall to completely disregard Jim Crow practices. Customers of different races mingled on the floor, possibly making it, “the only integrated ballroom in the country at the time,” as dancer Fannie Manning later recalled.ⁱ Unlike other clubs in Harlem (such as the Cotton Club) and midtown (like Roseland Ballroom), the Savoy had no rules about skin color determining who got admitted or where in the joint one was allowed to enjoy oneself. The club prided itself on a sense of decorum, designed to make the space feel safe for women. These policies were decided upon by Savoy’s multiracial management: two white owners, Jay Faggen and Moe Gale, along with director Charles Buchanan, a Black businessman who from the start was integral to the Savoy’s character.

A reported 5,000 people found their way to Lenox Avenue (also called Malcolm X Boulevard—both names are in use) and paid the seventy-five-cent cover charge for the Savoy on the night of March 12,1926, while 2,000 more were turned away.ⁱⁱ (The place was only supposed to hold 4,000.) The guests walked in to a decor of marble and mirrors, chandeliers and multicolored spotlights. Ready to greet them was host Madeline Allison, who was moonlighting; Allison’s day jobs in the 1920s included writing, editing, and illustrating for publications of the N.A.A.C.P. The Crisis and The Brownies Book, serving as secretary to W.E.B. Du Bois, and running a side hustle as a personal shopper for Black people who couldn’t make it to Harlem but wanted to purchase its wares. At the Savoy, Allison and the all-Black workers ushered guests through the carpeted reception area, up a marble staircase to the second story, into the immense hall featuring different sections of tables, private boxes, lounge chairs, flanked by soda fountains. (No booze, of course, was served.) All this gave way to the mahogany-colored, maple-wood dance floor of 10,000 square feet (according to some), that would later get nicknamed “the Track.” No smoking on the dance floor! was the rule, to keep it pristine. The staff included women dance instructors whose responsibilities comprised encouraging single men out onto the floor. These “taxi dancers,” in the parlance of the day, were, like the rest of the staff, entirely Black (whereas clubs like Roseland, for example, only hired white women dance instructors). The racial makeup of the employees was trumpeted in ads for the place.

The Savoy boasted a double bandstand plus what was called a “disappearing” (de-constructible) stage, making it possible to transition seamlessly between performers. Three bands played on opening night: the Charleston Bearcats of South Carolina and two local groups, Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra (leader Williams resplendent in a diamond-studded suitjacket), followed by Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. Both of the New York bands, among their all-Black rosters, featured Puerto Rican musicians: Clarinetist Gregorio Felix Delgado of Williams’s band, and tuba player Ralph Escudero in Henderson’s. Delgado and Escudero had been among the nineteen Puerto Rican musicians that James Reese Europe recruited for World War I “Harlem Hellfighters” 369th US Army regiment and its band—renowned for bringing syncopated rhythms to European listeners. (The current version of the 369^th band would play at the Savoy for Armistice Day, 1926). Both Delgado and Escudero settled in New York after the war and became go-to players of the city’s music scene.ⁱⁱⁱ The Savoy’s opening night lineup calls attention to the often-overlooked contributions made by Puerto Ricans to early jazz.

As March 12th turned to March 13th, the crowd—possibly including newly minted NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker, who had been invited by Faggen, his friend and a fellow onetime Tin Pan Alley songwriter—cheered on Henderson’s band, which closed out the night to a standing ovation. Happy patrons went home with souvenirs and, it turns out, bragging rights to have attended a monumental moment.

Twenty-five years after it opened, the Savoy would celebrate its history and anniversary by printing a booklet called The Savoy Story, complete with notes of congratulations from the likes of musicians like Louis Armstrong and Harlem figures like William Roche, owner of the rival Renaissance Ballroom. With Faggen long departed to run venues in Chicago and elsewhere, The Savoy Story emphasizes the partnership of Gale and Buchanan. But the truth is that Faggen was the originator of the venture. Originally from Philadelphia, of Eastern European descent, Faggen had come to New York in 1923 and helped manage Roseland and the Rosemont Ballroom in Brooklyn. In 1925 he approached luggage manufacturer Sigmund Galewski, also Jewish, with an idea for a new ballroom in Harlem. Sigmund was skeptical, but his wife Anna found the idea compelling, and the two decided that the project would be better suited for their son Moses (“Moe,” who had started abbreviating the family name as “Gale”), who had yet to find a consistent role in the family business, or anywhere else.^iv

Faggen and Gale partnered up, and, with financial backing from Anna Galewski, bought the site of the defunct Lenox Avenue car barns, occupying the entire block of the thoroughfare from 140th to 141st Streets: “a graveyard for obsolete traction equipment and other relics of an earlier horse and cable car era,” according to The Savoy Story.^v The owners agreed on some principles for the place, based on the model of Roseland—which had, in 1924, started offering Black bands (Henderson’s had been the second to play there). The main departure from Roseland was doing away with the segregated dance floor; Roseland’s was roped down the middle to prevent racial mixing. The owners envisioned a space embraced by, staffed by, the Harlem community, rented out for charity balls, private parties and community events (as it would frequently be). Years later, Moe’s brother Conrad Gale would say, “The idea was, this was going to be a Black ballroom for Black people run by Black people, and not be exploited.”^vi They set out to hire a Black manager, and found Buchanan, a Black real estate mogul who had emigrated from Barbados as a child. Buchanan was hired at $150 a week (roughly equal to $2.7K in 2026). He ran a tight ship, overseeing a small army of servers, cloak-room clerks, dance instructors, and burly private security officers dressed in formal wear. Employees attended bi-weekly “courtesy classes.”^vii With the Savoy, Buchanan would burnish his credentials as a Harlem civic leader. In 1929, he would marry stage performer Bessie Allison, who, decades later, became the first Black woman to serve in the New York State Assembly.

The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing in 1926, and the Savoy was a few blocks from the heart of the neighborhood at 135th and Lenox, where the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library had just opened the Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints, with Arturo Schomburg as its director. (The collection evolved into today’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.) Poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen frequented the library, occasionally helped by librarian and future novelist Nella Larsen. Just outside the library was Speaker’s Corner, where Marcus Garvey and Henry Harrison had honed their craft as orators, spawning countless imitators and detractors, and where Lillian Harris Dean, popularly known as “Pig Foot Mary,” sold her popular snacks to customers appreciative of the culinary evocation of their southern roots. Nearby were A’lelia Walker’s “Dark Tower” literary salon and event space; the headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Liberty Hall; the offices of the Black weekly The New York Age, and the new (as of 1923) site of the Abyssinian Church, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell presiding. Over on 7th Avenue, the Lafayette Theater and the multi-purpose Renaissance Ballroom, both under Black ownership, welcomed racially mixed audiences, but neither offered a desegregated dance floor. No major venue did (though Harlem’s famous drag balls of the time were certainly desegregated).

The Savoy opened a block away from a site at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue that had been Club Douglas until 1920, when boxer Jack Johnson bought it and renamed it Club DeLuxe, then flipping it to gangster Owney Madden in 1923. Madden and partner Larry Fay turned the spot into the famous, and famously segregated, Cotton Club, which hosted elite-level jazz—Duke Ellington’s residency started in 1927—for primarily white audiences. Hughes, in his memoir The Big Sea, would bitterly recall the Cotton Club as “a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites…not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles.”^viii Even blues pioneer and Black music legend W.C. Handy got turned away one night. The Cotton Club’s highly-drilled dance performers comprised only light-skinned Black women. Also barring Black patrons while hosting the popular Black stage shows of the day was Connie’s Inn at 131st Street and 7th Avenue, underneath the Lafayette, owned by the Immerman brothers, German emigres. Angry locals protested that Connie’s was selling hootch and doubling as a headquarters for the numbers-running racket, aka the “policy” game of Marcellina Cardena. One neighborhood place, Small’s Paradise, owned by Black entrepreneur Edwin Smalls, was desegregated but too miniscule for a dance floor. Downtown was more of the same. Black-owned Club Alabam on 44th Street—it had been a venture of Baron Wilkins until his murder in 1924–was considered the top downtown after-theater venue for Black music, only for white customers.

The very names of NYC venues for Black music like the Cotton Club, Club Alabam, and Club Everglades, evoked a the view of Black culture as less civilized, as if to balance the Harlem Renaissance’s progress in the area of civil rights and cultural recognition with reminders of the second-class status of Black New Yorkers. By contrast, the Savoy name, recalling the Savoy Hotel in London (though there was also a Savoy Theater on 34th Street), meant to connote grandeur and elegance. The Savoy Story explained that the name “symbolized the extravagance, glitter, charm and friendliness of the palais which was soon to be presented to the many thousands of discriminating dance and music lovers who sought wholesome recreation and entertainment in the Harlem that knows no boundaries.”

The Savoy’s own mythmaking implies that the name and everything else about the Savoy were intended to distinguish it, class-wise, from the speakeasies and less bourgeois spaces of Harlem

However, the Savoy publicized its affordability liberally: seventy-five cent entry on weekends, fifty on weekdays, twenty-five cents for three dances with an instructor, food and drink prices on par with neighborhood purveyors. So protective was the club about being known for not pricing out local customers that it took out advertisements claiming (perhaps not in good faith) that rumors had been spread about price gouging, and offering rewards for information about who started these stories.

The Savoy was an instant hit, packing in crowds in the thousands throughout its first weeks. Within two months of its opening, it announced that it was sharing its profits by giving raises to the entire staff. Its status was augmented a year later when it became associated with a popular new dance, the Lindy Hop, and cemented during the following decades with its stellar musical performances, famous band battles (apparently often “won” by Webb), and its contributions to the 1939 World’s Fair. There were bumps along the road, of course, primarily a brief closing in 1943 after trumped-up prostitution charges that Harlemites understood as really a NYPD crackdown on what had made the Savoy most famous to begin with: interracial dancing.^ix