tradition, though that was not how they said it.”11
And when the special child appeared, was nurtured, and took the stage of some city club, the ecstasy happened, as the people knew it would. In 1944, Billy Eckstine’s legendary big band went to St. Louis to play at a white nightclub called the Plantation Club. The owners insisted that Billy enter through the back door. He walked in the front door and they fired him on the spot. He took his band to the Riviera Club, an all-black club on Delmar and Taylor. The band included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Standing in for an absent trumpet player was eighteen-year-old Miles Davis.12
“Listen,” Miles wrote in his autobiography. “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together . . . when I heard Diz and Bird in B’s band, I said, ‘What? What is this!?’ Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary. I mean, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, Buddy Anderson, Gene Ammons, Lucky Thompson, and Art Blakey all together in one band and not to mention B: Billy Eckstine himself. It was a motherfucker. Man, that shit was all up in my body. Music all up in my body, and that’s what I wanted to hear. The way that band was playing music—that was all I wanted to hear. It was something. And me up there playing with them.”13
The triumph of the legendary band of Billy Eckstine was in part a result of the nurturing those amazing musicians had received throughout their lives.
There is another piece to the puzzle of “neon” and that is understanding that places can have a special quality that is greater than the sum of their parts. Neighborhoods can have magic.
Among the truly magic places on earth is the Hill District in Pittsburgh. I believe that, pound for pound, the Hill District was the most generative black community in the United States. When I say “pound for pound,” it is like arguing whether the lightweight Sugar Ray Leonard was a greater boxer than the heavyweight Muhammad Ali. The size difference is so great, the two would never have met head-to-head. So the discussion is always framed “pound for pound.” Take, for example, photographs. The Hill was so photogenic that Charles “Teenie” Harris took eighty thousand photographs. Richard Saunders was only in Pittsburgh a few months, but took three thousand pictures, mostly of the Hill. W. Eugene Smith almost succumbed to the photographic equivalent of narcosis of the deep, he struggled so hard to capture the images of the city, and the Hill District. The key is this: it was so lively, so absorbing, so hilly, that every picture was interesting. And that’s just for openers.
Eighty-six-year-old tap dancer Henry Belcher told me, “[The Hill District] was amazing. There was people all up and down the street all the time. It was like, well, I never did go to New Orleans, but I would say it was like in New Orleans or something, where if something was going on, people would be out mingling. The only place that I see now, that reminds me of what it used to be here, is on Carson Street on the South Side. See, on Carson Street after dark, people are mingling all up and down the street and in the joints. Well, that’s the way it used to be here. All up and down Centre Avenue.”
Everyone was in the streets, the fundamental place where the magic was created. The young boys were in the streets a lot, trying to make money to help their families and to take care of their own needs. Lots of men told me stories about their adventures doing little jobs. Ken Nesbitt, who was part of a focus group I led, talked of delivering dinners to the brothels and deciding that a pimp’s life was definitely better than the iceman’s. “The iceman, he had a horse and buggy. And I used to watch those guys, and say, ‘I’m never going to be like that, carrying ice, and shoving that coal down that cellar.’ You know, you getting two tons of coal, you got to shovel it down there in the cellar, you get up every morning, you are going to make their fire, and you are going to fix their stove because the stove is run by coal. And I didn’t want to be none of them guys there. Them guys worked too hard.”
Ken shared his discovery, made at an early age, of how to get change. “I’m talking five or six years old. My dad used to frequent Centre Avenue, the bars, and with us being on Clarke Street, it wasn’t that far. And I remember some of the bars had brass rails and sawdust on the floor, and I would go up there looking for my dad, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be up there, but everyone knew my dad and knew I was his son, so they’d give me quarters. And I said, ‘Hey, I can get some money!’ And even if I knew my dad wasn’t up there, I would be up there.”
George Moses, in the same group, remembered, “Every Saturday, it was just an unwritten law; every Saturday [the numbers runners] would come down there, and all the boys, there might be thirty of us, they’d take us out to Forbes Field, they’d buy us baseball tickets, and they got kind of like into that, they would support our little sandlot baseball team in the Lower Hill.”
Henry Belcher said, “Yeah, we was on the streets, selling papers. And we used to have little jam sessions on the corners. And someone would come around and he done got a new step or something. ‘Hey, look, man, here’s a step I got!’ And we would show each other steps, and we were actually teaching each other that way.”
When I asked him who invented that art form, he stressed, “The kids on the street accomplished these things themselves, like.” The exchange of dance steps was nourished by the existence of a performance circuit. Henry Belcher explained, “There were certain steps that every new dancer you’d meet knew. ’Cause, times we’d leave Pittsburgh, maybe we’d go up to Harrisburg and work in the clubs. Well, maybe some of them come from Philly or Washington, New York or something, can come up over there to work too. We’d be working on the same deal together. Well, there were certain things that we all knew, these routines. One was called a ‘sham’ and one was called the ‘be-scorts’ and we used to use them as an opening or a closing, because everybody already knew them. You didn’t have to make up no ending on the show.”
The interconnections—in this case, the young boys developing their individual virtuosity, the group establishing a common core of ideas, nurtured both by the local street scene and the national circuit—were essential to the survival and prosperity of the community. Because of the generative nature of the interconnections, those that showed true talent had many venues in which to nurture their talents—Henry Belcher said there were ten or twenty clubs in the Lower Hill, including the Sonia Club, the Crawford Grill, the Ritz Club, Stanley’s, Lopez, Javel Jungles, and the Washington Club, as well as the big theaters, such as the New Granada and the Roosevelt Theater.
“You had clubs, like, maybe two or three on every block . . . And then they had the after-hour clubs, they used to run all night long. People would be coming out of there and it would be daylight. People would be running to catch the streetcar. They had streetcars then; they didn’t have buses. And the people would be running to catch the streetcars and things. But it was amazing, you know? And you didn’t realize, you were just living with what was going on. But that’s just like the Hill House here.14 This was a Jewish place called the Irene Kaufman Settlement. But the Jews never realized that they would have to give that up to the blacks.”
The clubs were supported by the men and women who were working in the factories and mines of the Pittsburgh area. Henry Belcher said that, though they were uneducated people from the South, they had more money than they’d ever had in their lives. “And when they got their pay at the end of the week, they just had a ball.”
Interactions of all kinds kept the Hill afloat and made sure that everybody ate, had clothes to wear, and behaved properly. The boys on the streets got advice from older men: the dancers and musicians taught them how to refine their arts; the pimps showed them an easy way to make money; the regular guys urged them to go straight—“Even if you see me do it, don’t you do it.”
Thelma Lovette, who is a matriarch of the Hill, spoke with me about what the community was like when she was growing up in the 1920s and ’30s.15 She was the fifth of eleven children. Her mother had been born
