When history was made one summer Harlem night

When Harlem is hot, there aren’t many other places in the world where history seems to drip down so readily from the fire escapes and battered neon signs.

It’s all an illusion, of course, a mirage created by a blistering day. Most of us lucky enough not to be born into poverty can only match words and sounds to old edifices and piece together what it must have been like before the war and after the Harlem Renaissance when Joe Louis carried the hopes of an entire race out of Georgia, north to Detroit and Chicago then over to the big fight nights in New York.

The Cotton Club has long since moved south and west to a relatively nondescript compound on 125th Street while the Apollo is as drastically different as you’d expect for the headquarters of a culture which has ridden through so many storms.