The bowling alley at the old Alhambra Ballroom shuttered some times ago but now there is still 30,000 square foot of retail space that is available to lease.
Artist and Craftsman Supply just opened up in the basement level but finding an even larger business for this corner of ACP/7th Avenue by 126th Street has taken some time. Any suggestions? Read more about the history of The Alhambra in our past post:
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I pass the Alhambra a couple of times every day and I can't help but look up at it and think how my grandmother couldn't go dancing there when she came to Harlem in '41. According to her it was segregated. It makes me sad. Then directly across ACP Jr. Blvd sits the state office building on a site where so many Harlemites were displaced.
ReplyDeleteSegregation was (and is) a complicated matter. Upon opening in 1926 as a movie theater, the Alhambra welcomed both blacks and whites--though blacks had to sit in the balcony (it's where the term "Nigger Heaven" is derived). Louis Armstrong's second wife, who was black, was a "staff" dancer at the Alhambra when it became a nightclub, but as with the Cotton Club, only whites were welcomed as patrons. Bessie Smith played there in 1926--it's where the white record producer John Hammond first heard her (he was only 16!). Apparently the musicians were all white--George Schuyler remembered A. Philip Randolph plotting to desegregate the orchestra pit as a very serious kind of joke. There's evidence that the Alhambra no longer segregated those who came to watch films there in the 1930s. But race continued to be a troubling matter at the Alhambra--Malcolm X led a Nation of Islam protest there in 1960 against the film Hannibal Great, which had some less-than-respectful depictions of African Americans.
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