ABSTRACT
The legend about the migration of jazz in New York City is that it was first played Uptown in the twenties, when white people flocked to Harlem night clubs, then in Midtown in a crowded warren of clubs on West 52nd Street during the thirties and forties, and finally Downtown in Greenwich Village and neighborhoods south and east of the Village. As Arnold Shaw put it in his study of 52nd Street, “[v]iewed sociologically, 52d Street is the story of how Harlem came downtown-not only its music and dances, but its chicken and rib joints and its talented people.”1
