Without any warning, Boston’s Club Zanzibar abruptly shut down after only three weeks in business, on May 6, 1948. What happened?
Coleman Hawkins played the Zanzibar Club’s last stand
A big crowd turned out for the splashy April 16 opening of the Club Zanzibar, at 254 Huntington Ave, opposite Symphony Hall. This wasn’t a lucky location. Whatever the reasons, clubs didn’t make it here. The Music Box, the Arcadia, Casa Manana…the places came and went. With the Club Zanzibar, though, we can make a pretty good guess as to why it failed after three weeks.
The Zanzibar was on the second floor, up above another club called the Show Boat. It owed its name to the Jerome Kern musical, and it offered old-time nostalgic entertainment. There were minstrel shows, and a long-running revue called “Cotton-Picking Time.” Between shows a band played dance music. So that was downstairs, and the Zanzibar Club was going upstairs, and it planned a name-band jazz policy. Perhaps you can see where this is heading.
The Zanzibar booked Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy for opening week, along with singer Leslie Scott, not long off Louis Armstrong’s big band. The relief band was Sherman Freeman’s Boston group. Everything copasetic? Everybody involved with the club thought so.
Others, including perhaps the Cotton Blossom types downstairs, didn’t think so. The Boston Chronicle, the weekly newspaper serving the African-American community, covered the story on how things played out. The daily papers ignored it. The headline on the the first story on April 24: “Peeves Fail to Close Nite Club.”
The Club Zanzibar was the first business located in the Symphony entertainment district to be owned and operated by blacks, and that scared some of the area’s whites witless. “This was the first time that a place of business had opened in the Back Bay with such a large Negro patronage.” said the Chronicle. “A move was started at once to create an unwritten Jim Crow law against the use of the club for Negroes.” Unnamed neighboring businesses pressured the club management to admit fewer blacks. Nothing doing. They refused, telling the Chronicle that “under no condition would the club close its doors, but would continue to welcome all patrons who wished to enter.”
After a week, the owners did change club’s name to the Zircon, but it isn’t clear why. Perhaps the neighbors thought a club named after a mineral would attract fewer of those dreaded people of color than one named after an island off the coast of Africa.
Zircon opened with Coleman Hawkins on the bandstand on April 23. “We Are Open And Will Stay Open!” proclaimed the club’s Chronicle advertisement. On May 1, they were open and advertising. A week later, though, the Zanzibar/Zircon was shuttered. It was just gone, without a trace, not even a mention in the Chronicle. A Chinese restaurant later moved in.
We’ll never know just what happened to the Zanzibar. My guess is, since the club’s managers wouldn’t bend, the anti-club faction leaned on their landlord to close the place down.
The Show Boat carried on. In fact, in 1949 it tried a jazz policy itself. It failed, failed so badly it took the Sabby Lewis Orchestra down with it. After that it tried the Ringside Revue, with “champion acrobatic” women wrestlers and midget boxers. Just the thing for date night.
That’s what it was like when people got frightened in 1948.