Cotton Club Cotton Club The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub located in Harlem on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue from 1923 to 1935, then briefly in the midtown Theater District from 1936 to 1940. The club operated most notably during the United States' era of Prohibition. The club was a whites-only establishment, but featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant; vocalists Adelaide Hall, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the
History of New York City (1898–1945) American literature. For many years, especially in the 1920s, Harlem was home to a flourishing of social thought and culture that took place among numerous Black artists, musicians, novelists, poets, and playwrights. The most famous writers included Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. The Jazz Age featured celebrities, among the most notable in the city were Madame Polly Adler; jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald; dancer Martha Graham; speakeasy host Texas Guinan; publisher Henry Luce of "Time" magazine; writer Dorothy Parker and the pundits at the Algonquin Hotel; editor Harold Ross at "The New Yorker" magazine; and