{"id":13675,"date":"2013-07-12T03:22:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T03:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/?p=13675"},"modified":"2013-07-12T03:26:38","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T03:26:38","slug":"uptown-correspondent-iman-r-abdulfattah-odeon-theatre-145th-street-harlem-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/2013\/07\/12\/uptown-correspondent-iman-r-abdulfattah-odeon-theatre-145th-street-harlem-nyc\/","title":{"rendered":"Uptown Correspondent – Iman R. Abdulfattah – Odeon Theatre – 145th Street – Harlem, NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

\u00a9 Iman R. Abdulfattah<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

\u00a9 Iman R. Abdulfattah<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

\u00a9 Iman R. Abdulfattah<\/p><\/div>\n

In an interview with Harlemite and Manhattan borough historian Celedonia \u201cCal\u201d Jones, he said he remembered sneaking into the Odeon in the late 1930s to watch movies as a child. Cal, who lived two or three blocks north of the Odeon, said, \u201cWhen you go shopping for theatres to sneak into, you perfected your talents on the local theatres. We had it down pretty pat.\u201d Cal recounted, \u201cOne of us snuck in and he\u2019d come around and crack the door and the rest of us would crawl upstairs.\u201d Sometimes he would \u201cback into the theatre,\u201d which is the remarkable talent of walking backward while people were exiting. Cal also remembers that the Odeon sets of jelly glasses to the first hundred paying customers who got in the theatre or some other kind of promotional gift. Usually the Odeon showed a double feature but not first-run films. \u201cAfter it hit downtown, it would work its way uptown, so for the area, they were first runs.\u201d Cal\u2019s buddy Sonny Neal remembered the newsreels between the films. Sonny said they would show the black newsreels after the general newsreels, like the clips about the all-black troops during World War II. Cal remembers he had heard the theatre once had live vaudeville performances, but by the time he was \u201ccoming up\u201d in Harlem, during its renaissance, the Odeon was a straight movie house.<\/p>\n

In a letter written by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee to restore the Apollo Theatre (formerly known as the Hurtig & Seaman\u2019s New Burlesque Theatre), the following information about the Odeon Theatre was provided:<\/p>\n

\n

Brecher and Schiffman were white businessmen who played a major role in the history of Harlem\u2019s entertainment industry as owner-operators of a number of Harlem\u2019s leading theatres featuring black entertainers. Brecher was owner of several Broadway and Harlem clubs and theatres, while Schiffman was a theatre operator and motion picture distributor. They first became business partners in 1920, converting the Odeon Theatre (1910, Van Buren & Lavelle, 256 West 145th Street) to show motion pictures.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Many of the old theatres and movie houses had elaborate organs that were played in between vaudeville acts or during films, which up to then were still silent films. There is an interesting connection between the owners of the Odeon and a young jazz organist by the name of Thomas Waller. While reading some selected passages from the book Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf by Barry Singer, required reading for a course at the Center for the Humanities at Washington University at St. Louis about the American poet and jazz lyricist Andy Razaf, I was happy to discover that his musical partner, twenty year- old Thomas \u201cFats\u201d Waller, was employed by Brecher and Schiffman.<\/p>\n

\n

Wildly unsuited to a wife who\u2019d finally divorced her unreliable musician-husband in late 1923, and still sorely missing his late mother, young Waller reveled in the camaraderie of musicians, loving to jam with them, loving to drink with them. The orchestra rows surrounding his organ post at the Lincoln Theatre often were filled with musician friends drinking in Waller\u2019s astonishing keyboard talent, passing the bottle, laughing with him as he often provided outrageous musical accompaniment to the action onscreen. Willie \u201cthe Lion\u201d Smith would later suggest that Waller\u2019s unsuspected, painful shyness was the cause of his early alcoholism. Everyone, including young Waller, loved the person he became boozed up. The drinking escalated rapidly.<\/em><\/p>\n

In March 1925 Marie Downes, owner of the Lincoln Theatre, informed her organist that she had decided to sell the old film house to Frank Schiffman and his partner Leo Brecher\u2014two white men, operators of the Odeon Theatre on 145th Street and both the Harlem Opera House and Loew\u2019s Seventh Avenue burlesque theatre on 124th Street, who were about to attempt an ambitious consolidation of black vaudeville entertainment in Harlem.<\/p>\n

The news stung Waller, who viewed the Lincoln in much the same light as he did the revered memory of his late mother. Schiffman and Brecher, however, cordially brought the young keyboardist up to their offices, where they openly informed him of their plans to turn the Lincoln into a straight movie house while transferring the old theatre\u2019s successful vaudeville programming to the larger Lafayette, which, after undergoing continual policy reconfigurations over the previous few years, was for the moment a straight movie house presenting only sporadic stage shows. The two men then offered Waller the Lafayette organist\u2019s job for $50 a week (double his Lincoln Theatre salary), crowning the news with the information that if he accepted, Waller could expect to play a Robert Marston\u2013model organ at the Lafayette, the first grand organ to be found in Harlem.<\/p>\n

–\u00a0Excerpt from The Fading Ads of New York City (History Press, 2011) \u00a9 Frank H. Jump<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interview with Harlemite and Manhattan borough historian Celedonia \u201cCal\u201d Jones, he said he remembered sneaking into the Odeon in the late 1930s to watch movies as a child. Cal, who lived two or three blocks north of the Odeon, said, \u201cWhen you go shopping for theatres to sneak into, you perfected your talents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2033,710,711,2281,2257],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fading-ads-of-nyc-the-book","category-harlem","category-harlem-renaissance","category-odeon-theatre","category-uptown-correspondent"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pXBbJ-3yz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13675"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13680,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13675\/revisions\/13680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}