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New York, United States
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Attraction
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624 Esplanade Gardens Plaza, New York, NY 10037, USA
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The Savoy Ballroom was a large ballroom for music and public dancing located at 596 Lenox Avenue, between 140th and 141st Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Lenox Avenue was the main thoroughfare through upper Harlem. Black poet Langston Hughes calls it the Heartbeat of Harlem in Juke Box Love Song, and he set his acclaimed work “Lenox Avenue: Midnight on the legendary street". The Savoy was one of many Harlem hot spots along Lenox, but it was the one to be called the “World’s Finest Ballroom”. It was in operation from March 12, 1926, to July 10, 1958, and as Barbara Englebert writes in her article 'Swinging at the Savoy', it was "...a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the 'soul' of a neighborhood". It was opened and owned by white entrepreneur Jay Faggen and Jewish businessman Moe Gale. It was managed by African-American real estate business man Charles Buchanon. Buchanon sought to run a “luxury ballroom to accommodate the many thousands who wished to dance in an atmosphere of tasteful refinement, rather than in the small stuffy halls and the foul smelling, smoke laden cellar nightclubs. . .”
