Menu Club Plantation 3617 Delmar St. Louis Black Americana Jazz Nightclub

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Menu Club Plantation 3617 Delmar St. Louis Black Americana Jazz Nightclub :
$15.24

An historic and very disturbing listing here – on top of the “Strictly White Patronage Only” and research about the famous Black jazz musicians that played at this club, it was also evidently gangster / mob Run. The headliners for the shows were African American, but they could not come in the front door and the audience was \"whites only,\" - this was not even a segregated club

Besides the disturbing verbage, the Black Face on the front is also very disturbing – a very offensive cartoon black face with “Man dat sho was good!”

Club Plantation, 911 North Vandeventor

3 Floor Shows Nightly

Strictly White Patronage Only

Franklin 7244-9605

St. Louis, MO

Size about 5\" X 7 1/2\"

MINT CONDITION

From research online – musicians were some of the best jazz and blues musicians of all time, but thePlantation Club would not allow them to fraternize with the white customers or enter through the front door.

A small listing of famous blues jazz musicians that played at the Plantation Club:

Billy Eckstine’s band played there, with musicians Charlie Parker, Lucky Thompson, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie (as musical director), and vocalists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. The Mills Brothers put on shows, along with the Noble Sissle Orchestra, the Ink Spots, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgeraldto name just a few.

Time of the club and the house band: 1931 to 1947.

Club Plantation opened in 1931, with St. Louis pianist Eddie Johnson and his Crackerjacks performing, the band leader. By 1934, the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra was in the place. Childhood friends from Cleveland, OH, saxophonists Hayes Pillars and James Jeter arrived at the club for a short stint but remained there until 1944, when they moved on to the Riviera, a black club owned by Jordan Chambers. The George Hudson Orchestra replaced them at the Plantation.

Jeter-Pillars Orchestrawas said to be the most popular band in the city by 1942. It was featured on both local and national radio programs, including “The Fitch Bandwagon,” a Sunday night NBC program that featured big bands from 1938-1948.

Club Plantation closed in 1947, the same year that Jeter and Pillars broke up their band.

Owned by a St. Louis gangster – as was described on a a web site citing a book on early St. Louis jazz and blues:

Al Capone may be one of America’s most well-known gangsters and a symbol of lawlessness in Chicago, yet his crimes are proudly exhibited in Chicago’s History Museum. There is no museum in St. Louis for the prohibition era gangsters of the city. While that may be due to, well let’s just say, an overly-sensitive inhibition concerning all facets of its history, the true fact why the Mob bosses in the Lou aren’t well known is a testament to how much better they were than Capone. After all, surely the main job of a good Mob boss is to keep everyone in the city from knowing you’re the Mob boss.

The St. Louis gangster,Tony Scarpelliowned the Club Plantation. The club operated as a set-ups nightclub, meaning they sold food and provided ice, soft drinks, and glasses and the customers brought their own liquor. This way they could stay open later than the 1 o’clock curfew for taverns. A liquor law work-around.

St. Louis has a long-held distaste for liquor laws. First, because beer and wine are a part of the traditions and culture for the St. Louis German, Irish and Italian immigrants, and second, because of the great brewing industry that employed many of the citizens. There’s also a long tradition of organized crime in St. Louis as well, including mobsters Dinty Colbeck and Buster Wortman, whose careers were also principally, well let’s just say, in the liquor and spirits trade. So St Louis had Jazz Age prohibition entertainment and nightlife as vibrant as Chicago, Los Angeles or Las Vegas, and they also had the same kind of prohibition trouble.

I have owned about 35 years. Still looks mint to me.

Shipping 2.99