An Afro-Cuban Blessing

Havana, 1941

In a wooden shed that was mostly an altar of some sort, with much of the open sky for a roof, lived the most highly respected Santero in all of Cuba. He lived among a jumbled botanica of wax flowers, unrelated plaster saints of various sizes, and framed deities. Small sacks with secret contents were handing from the trees…. In short, I found myself visiting an authentic sanctuary in a spiritual jungle. Nevertheless, I felt strangely at ease in this unlikely garden, in this absurd theater, in this unfamiliar makeshift environment.

All this had actually begun a few nights earlier, when after an all-night party, I had left Miami for Havana to study at the University of Havana with Professor Bustamonte. On the way to the Hotel Inglaterra with my hangover, I kept my eyes shut against the Cuban sun. Being siesta, the empty streets seemed uninteresting. Once in my room, I fell onto the bed and into the arms of Morfeo. Around seven o’clock, I was slowly awakened by an approaching musical alarm. From the balcony window came sounds from the street. Unaccustomed to balconies, I grasped the railing to steady myself. Down below ran a river of colored lanterns gyrating among ruffle-skirted and ruffle-shirted dancers. With ceremonious authority, a parade of intensely disciplined congueros passed by as if in review. When the spectators below stood on their chairs, no doubt the highlight of the spectacle was approaching. Los Dandys de Belen were strutting by, New Orleans–style, with tails, spats, twirling canes and top hats. “Sient’ un bongo, mamita me’ta llamando, sient’ un bongo…”

I had arrived in Havana, unaware that it was Carnival. This was not mere touristic, theatrical display. Imagine my amazement. This was more than theme floats and majorettes…this was serious universal harmony…the splendor of a joyous humanity. The fireworks were in the eyes of these people. Where did the individual begin and the rhythm begin, since they were one? Overcome, and like an espantaneo, I ran down and plunged into the delirium of it all, falling in step with the elegant/primitive fantasy. I had gone from a stupor that hot afternoon, arriving in Havana for the first time, to the sobering sudden discovery of one of life’s true amazements: a bounteous gaiety ready to be shared with the whole world. Like winning the lottery of felicity.

Several days later, I mentioned casually to a student friend that I had been having difficulty reading Dr. Fernando Ortiz and Orifiche. I was struggling with the Lukumi vocabulary and negligible Spanish. He suggested crossing over to Regla to meet Juan Beson. There may still be people who remember this most influential babalao, with his tall, thin noble stance and his solitary front tooth that, like a badge, evinced a certain sincerity.

“What is he up to?” I wondered, as I stood back watching him light some candles. “He is invoking La Virgen de Regla, asking for protection for your house,” said my friend. The babalao was responding to the answer I had given him when he asked me, “Why have you come here?” (This is the same question a psychologist asks a new patient.) I was unprepared with a reply and with Ñañigo proverbs traveling Quixote-like around my brain, I was about to confess that it was not my intention to come…that my friend had suggested it…when I stammered…“la…la música.”

At that moment, the night surrounding us seemed to physically withdraw itself in respectful silence. From this tableau of a babalao, a young American and his Cuban friend, a trinity emerged like three magi in a holy night. As I received his blessing, I felt that he knew very well why I had come to Regla. “You will carry this music around the world,” he said. Was this a prophesy, or a command of sorts? Was it an example of his psychic insight? Whatever the meaning, it has influenced me all my life…of that there is no doubt. Knowing absolutely nothing of the technicalities of music, but now much imbued with the workings of its mysterious power. Was I to go forth like a neophyte apostle, an evangelist proselytizer?

Much shaken by this truly religious experience, I wondered: Was his odd statement merely an example of lyrical rhetoric? And example of pastoral eloquence, an embellishment of a ritual, a divinely inspired assignment? A fortuitous indoctrination, a revelation that made me a propagator of this music? A step toward my greater spiritual education, a sacred covenant, an oracular portent? An inescapable aesthetic responsibility that made me involved, indebted, privileged? A canonization witnessed by invisible Orishas, an unexpected imposition that made me an instrument of the music itself? Was the santero a channeler between Yemaya and a new convert?

After this encounter, one fact emerges from the overall picture of my life. I can see that I have faithfully “carried the music around the world.” Returning from Cuba in 1941, I opened dance studios all along Miami Beach; performed with the La Playa Dancers around the United States; exhibited rumba with the USO in Samar, Phillipines; run the Champagne Dance Contests aboard cruise ships; lead the immensely popular conga lines of the 1950s; taught with Tony and Lucille Colon at Grossinger’s; lectured oral history of the music at the Smithsonian; and donated my poster collection of Latin orchestras to Boys Harbor. I was given a dream in Regla that today I see slowly materializing into reality, like a plant I have watered. Surely we make the world a better place with this happy music…a duty that is set before all mankind…is it not? So it was foretold that I would one day write this for you to read.

“Blessed is he who has found his work.” —Thomas Carlyle

Homage to the Heroes

A visit to Staten Island's Meucci-Garibaldi Museum. Livelli pere was a fan.

Vince's 88th Birthday

On April 9, 2008, Vincent gathered with friends for a "Testimonial Dinner" at the Pearl Oyster Bar in Greenwich Village, which occupies the building where the Cornelia St. Bookstore once stood. Vincent owned the shop with his good friend, the literary critic Anatole Broyard. What follows is Vince's address:

"Sixty years ago, Greenwich Village was a nice quiet neighborhood. We went to war as kids and came back as men, more mature but still unsophisticated and unpolished, in spite of our overseas exposure. Even with its bohemian background of poetry circles, speakeasies, rebellious antecedents and whispers of free love, we were young and innocent in many ways—especially where art and literature were involved.

One man’s dream, a bookstore, put a roof over what went on and became a kind of family kitchen for the cultural nourishment of young local artists and writers who came in to sit around a potbellied stove talking of Proust, Celine and Kafka well into the dark hours of a cold winter night.

The Cornelia Street Bookstore, even though it failed after only eight months, had made us take notice of our vacuous knowledge of good literature. The idea of upgrading the level of our taste and familiarity with good reading was based on offering, not trashy pulp fiction, but the avant-garde, unknown authors such as Henri Michaux, European intellectuals, first editions, out-of-prints, signed copies, books of collectible value, rarities.

Anatole soon created a class of readers whose hunger now demanded quality. People were seen reading and carrying books or talking books on Washington Square Park benches. The bookshop failed, not for lack of funds, demand or location (Cornelia is rather hidden away, as streets go). It failed because Anatole was unable to provide the merchandise to stock his shelves that began to look like bare cupboards. In other words, the demand outgrew the supply of suitable books. To make things worse, Anatole was reluctant to part with his favorite tomes and became a serious collector rather than a dealer.

With the bookstore gone, he stored his precious collection in Sheri Martinelli’s apartment on Jones Street. When she discovered his other girlfriends, she vengefully shipped his books to Somers, New Jersey, until he would change his ways, she hoped. Such desperate holding hostage of his soul may have been resolved some way or other, but I never learned how.

Anatole’s customers followed him into the San Remo restaurant where we set up a literary salon as a replacement for the back room of the bookstore, When the Santini brothers heard us talking about d’Annunzio and Pirandello, Lorca and Boccaccio, we were made welcome. The new cultural impact we originated was to be usurped by the arrival of drugs. In Kafka Was the Rage, Anatole wrote “Books were our drugs.” He and I witnessed and bemoaned this detour of our country’s cultural history.

Today, with technology, you have the equivalent of the printing press. Use it to recapture the healthier, friendlier, freer universal societal climate that we earlier guys and gals installed sixty years ago here at number 18 Cornelia Street, before there was a national awareness for it, before Channel 13, Arthur C. and Catherine T., PBS, WGBH, NEA or the artists and writers colonies.

When my friend José Mangual’s birthday cake was set before him, he reversed the plastic “54,” making it “45” and making himself ten years younger. I can’t do that, at 88, nor would I do so if I could."

Eulogy for Julio

...part two of a tribute to Julio Andino

Before there was an Ernesto Antonio “Tito” Puente, there was Julio Andino. While Tito even has the 1979 Sugar Hill hip-hop to his many credits, Julio has no mention as a musician who brought the entire Latino music world before the public, the global public. While Tito introduced the xylophone’s power, and Cugat popularized rumba, Ignacio Piniero the son, and Arsenio the Afro-Cuban element, Julio brought into play a whole body of mainly repressed Latin music that was ignored while he himself was ignored.

Many give credit to Azpiazu’s “El Manisero,” but Julio did more than make people dance. He made them stop and listen and think and in doing so they heard the soul of the music calling to them. It was a sad, tough world of “no job, no heat, no hot water”—the years of the Great Depression that Julio navigated. It was one that Tito never knew the way Julio did. Tito is here forever while it is as though Julio never was, even though Tito, with admirable compassion in a heartless industry, was gratefully acknowledging Julio’s influence, an influence initiated by Julio that brought out the pride in Puerto Rican communities everywhere.

For forty years, Joe Conzo Jr. spoke for Tito as his manager while Julio was surrounded by those who would silence him. He never heard the screaming adherents that followed Tito, for himself; but he does have what Hindus consider sainthood. Like a mahatma, Julio was that one man alone who sent out the message of this music of the streets to the four corners of the world by prying open the door that closeted El Barrio musicians. He pioneered for them both the white and black dominated turfs of the late 1930s. He made possible the one trustworthy source of joy in a beset world—one that sings a child to sleep and one whose thunder and lightning can blow you away.

Tito’s popularity, for one, is Julio’s legacy.

Mamá Inez in Tokyo

There was no dancing in the streets when the Instrument of Surrender was being signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor. But a week later, they were dancing the rumba in a club just off the Ginza.

Aside from the usual black market activity and swapping chewing gum for sex, there was little in the way of entertainment during the early days of the Occupation. True, the porn shops were reopening, but there was no music in the night air. Tokyo needed a hot spot badly—one to cater to the GIs who didn’t get into the only game in town: the “off limits” Marunouchi Hotel Restaurant, that had been taken over entirely by officers and journalists.

When I met a young Japanese circus acrobat speaking understandable English, who had worked in the States before the war, we teamed up to open the Tokyo Officers Club. We named it that defiantly, hanging up our sign in an alley off the Ginza. The club had no furniture except for a chair and an unstable table, so no one would be just hanging out. But it did have—amazingly—a vintage windup Victrola that survived the bombing, a solid-enough floor, two scratchy pre-war records from the States and some Japanese recordings that were not danceable. On the table were large-size bottles of excellent Santori scotch plus very large bottles of fine Japanese beer.

Opening night was slow but the Victrola was the drawing card in an otherwise silent night. Like the Israeli State Symphony signaling the return to normalcy after the Israeli-Arab War, this music was carrying a clear message to the curious passersby, who stepped out of the bombed streets and into another world. The GIs were there to drink, and the thin, bashful girls that entered, whose curiosity had overcome their shyness, were made welcome—no longer the enemy, they were the main attraction that brought the soldiers in their army boots onto the floor to dance with the girls in their gaetas (wooden platforms to avoid the muddy streets). One record was entitled “Little Grass Shack in Kahala Kahula, Hawaii,” but it was the second one that got things moving: “O Mamá Inez, O Mamá Inez, Todos los Negros Tomamó Café.”

If Japan is loco for salsa today, you can thank Mamá Inez.

Dance Floors I Have Known

We were dancing the conga on the roof of the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo in 1958, when suddenly all hell broke loose. The Egyptians began shooting off fireworks celebrating the British evacuation of the Sudan. Cheers and laughter greeted explosions until sparks, smoke and flames began to fall at our feet. The band kept playing and the drummers accented each burst as we began to hop and leap with every dangerous blast, like rabbits. You could say the place was really jumping that night.

More peaceful and relaxed moments on the dance floor were spent at the Rainbow Room where society behaved properly, unaware that they were dancing on turf owned by the Mafia management of that time. In Miami Beach at the famous Beachcomber Club, I asked a young lady to dance after requesting permission from the two gentlemen she was seated with at ringside. Little did I know that I was dancing with Virginia Hill and that the two gentlemen were Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. When she told me her name, I was careful to dance well “apart” during the slow sexy number. Speaking of dancing apart—as disco dancing prefers—it was in Singapore in the fairgrounds that I first witnessed hundreds of young couples artfully dancing without touching. It required some skill and restraint….

New York’s Havana Madrid, with an entrance down a few steps, featured a small bar seating six, overlooking a truly small dance floor that was raised when the floorshow was to begin. The patrons, so eager to dance, convinced the management to leave the dance floor raised rather than waste the time it took to retract it back under the bandstand again. It was at the Havana Madrid that I saw Rene and Estela—he, performing with a glass of water on his head and one balanced at the end of his extended foot as he did the tornillo without spilling a drop. He also performed a somersault, picking up a handkerchief off the dance floor with his teeth. At the Park Plaza on 110^th and Fifth Avenue in 1938, Rene had made me get up from my chair so that Estela could teach me to one/two/three/pause, when I didn’t even know how to foxtrot. What I learned on that dance floor that night served me for a lifetime.

Like true fanatics, we ran from La Conga around the corner to the Havana Madrid and back, not even ordering a drink, in order to keep dancing while each of the clubs’ respective bands took their breaks. We might be hearing the same songs in either club. It was almost like not missing a step. Since the clubs were building up their businesses, the managements didn’t stop good rumberos from getting on the floor, even though they weren’t paying customers.

At Fe Fe’s Monte Carlo on the east side, where I seem to recall Enric Madriguera’s upscale café society orchestra playing, I had the nerve to walk in cold with less than a dollar on me, since patrons would invite rumba dancers and teachers to join them. That scene ended abruptly for me when, at one matinee, an inebriated Tommy Manville, the asbestos millionaire, loudly objected to my rumbaing with his young blonde companion.

At the Waldorf-Astoria’s Empire Room in 1943, Xavier Cugat presented Miguelito Valdez singing “Babalu” from behind a curtain. By doing so, Miguelito had just broken down the strict hotel policy of “no person of color.” When he emerged onto the floor, with the slowly brightening spotlight on him, his perspiring rendition of a truly astounding number served to make musical and racial history. I got on the dance floor doing a wild rumba with my partner. The management asked me to leave the floor even though I was dancing, and wearing a U.S. Army uniform at a time when soldiers could take liberties.

Today Beacon, New York, has a very large Latino community that’s mostly Central American, but back in ’38, the gringo audience at the Beacon Theater had never seen the rumba, tango, samba or merengue. (The routines we did were set by the Davalo’s Dance Studio upstairs on Broadway and 48^th.) This was most fortunate, that is, because the sold-out crowd did not recognize that we, three couples, were not performing correctly since one partner, when the band began, was still searching for his jacket in our dressing room. This meant the routines went on with three girls and two men—which was of course chaotic! The fact was that when he finally appeared, no one in the audience seemed to notice anything had been amiss.

Dance studios in Miami Beach hotels were unknown until the rumba and conga craze began in 1940. From that time on, all the mushrooming new hotels lining Collins Avenue had to provide for a studio, usually just off the lobby, that served to add a note of “tumult.” The elevated stage that was also the dance floor at the new Carousel Club on 20^th and Collins Avenue was so large that although we were not three but four couples doing Latin, we still couldn’t fill the stage. The American all-girl band was led by Anna Ray Hutton. Other clubs, like the Five O’Clock (drinks on the house at five), managed very well with just three couples, and the small Club Bali in Miami, a clandestine gambling joint, hardly held three. The big song was “Tonight We Love.”

Speaking of tumult—a “Jewish” idiomatic expression meaning gaiety—we taught on the polished dance floors of Tony and Lucille Colon’s dance studio at Grossinger’s in the Catskills in 1947. We would also hop over to the rival Concord Hotel to dance the new Perez Prado mambo to the great Curbelo Orchestra. Curbelo also played at the Embassy Club on 57^th Street, and at La Martinique, 57 West 57^th Street (owned by Dario and his brother), where we danced on the crowded Saturday “Rhumba Matinees” in innovative air-conditioned comfort.

There was no air-conditioning at the Teatro Municipal in Rio in 1952, where we joined hundreds of high Carioca society perspiring—not in the Carnival costumes that, because of Rio’s exhausting night temperatures are the scantiest to be found anywhere, but in strict formal wear. At one point, when all the house lights were extinguished, hundreds of sparkling diamonds flashed at us as the huge spotlights swept back and forth over the gigantic dance floor. I imagine that one does not even experience that at a Hollywood Oscar night or even on the celebrity Mediterranée red carpet in Cannes. When I close my eyes, I can still see their mirrored brilliance.

The most enormous dance floors were those in Havana at the Palacio Asturias and Palacio Gallego. Since dancing is as much a part of Cuban life as breathing, it is clear why the floors were not only so spacious, but located not on one but on two floors of each building, with one floor for the more conservative dancers. Much simpler, in a much poorer country, we danced in an open field under strings of Christmas lights during Panama’s Carnival. Dancing in total darkness on the sandy beach in Saint Martin was cool, followed by a plunge in the surf to continue embracing in the water.

Many drug stores in the fifties had soda fountains. The one under the Palladium’s dance floor risked flakes of paint and plaster falling down on customers. To enter the Palladium, you climbed two flights, stopping to pay your dollar admission on the first floor. There was Cuban Night or Puerto Rican Night until it became everyone’s night. Jimmy La Vaca’s drums were set up next to a two-story iron staircase exit that he told me someone was thrown down. The universal exhilaration came at you from the combined sound and scene (whereas the unwholesome melee years later at Studio 54 was basically artificially drug-induced).

These too well-lit barn-like dance halls lacked the romantic intimacy and almost familial environment of smaller spots like the Park Plaza, that one could label a neighborhood institution. The tiny ticket window at the entrance resembled today’s barricaded bodega cashiers. Primitive toilet facilities at the Park Plaza featured a very long communal trough with constantly running water, visible to the ladies who passed by on their way to the ladies’ room. Bells sounded for rare disturbances. (In Washington Heights, at the Audubon Ballroom, the venue of Malcom X’s assassination, Anatole Broyard and I witnessed a senseless murder while people kept dancing. I called it a triumph of life over death.) Chairs lining the walls, separating women and men, were thrown onto the dance floor as mock protest when the band appeared ready to take a break. This playful demonstration was inspired by the popular cowboy movies of the 1930s.

The dancehall was safer than West 114^th St. called the most dangerous street in Harlem, before it was torn down for a housing unit. Between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue, West 116^th was the main street, along with 125^th Street. Fifth Avenue was a two-way street, ending downtown inside Washington Square Park, for the wonderful wicker seated double-decker buses.

The sloppy bar with its wet floor and beer bottles underfoot didn’t speak well for the Palladium. Nell’s, on West 14^th Street, had an awkward floor, causing entrants to pass through dancers on their way to tables. The Corso in Yorkville, 205 East 86^th Street, upstairs and “open ’til 6 a.m.”, had great music but a bad reputation until standards were lowered, as would be the case at Studio 54.

When the building was sold and the Palladium was gone, a second Palladium was attempted on East 14^th Street in the 1960s but its location defeated it. The venerable Roseland continues providing pleasure, having offered names like Hector Lavoe, Milly y Los Vecinos, Orchestra La Sensual, Angel Canales, Machito, Santiago Ceron and Yomo Toro, Davilita, along with veterans like bassist Leo Fleming, conguero Candido, and timbalero Manny Oquendo.

Going back to the 1930s, we would memorialize the Park Placa (now La Iglesia Cristiana Pentacostal) that we can call the progenitor, with our heads bowed in recognition of the past and present genius that is alive still as it was performed by, for instance, Doroteo Santiago, Pagani's Happy Boys, Panchito Rizet, etc. Que dios los bendigan todos.

It wasn’t Madison Square Garden, the New Yorker Music Center or at the Audubon Ballroom where we personally found our most supreme dance experience. It wasn’t El Liborio, Tropicana or even in the bateys of Havana. It wasn’t at the Casino Intrnational in Port au Prince, the Silver Slipper in Nassau, the Scheherazade in Paris.

It was under a canopy riddled with billions of diamonds, where a carpet of low hanging stars danced along with us. Out on deck in the darkness, off the coast of Bahia while crossing the equator under the Southern Cross, where we frolicked with gravity, rolling with the ocean, rocked in the cradle of the ship while land was a thousand fathoms beneath our feet. We were dancing on the ocean.

Nací Para Bailar, or: If it wasn’t for the rumba, I wouldn’t be here

Latin entertainment has always found a comfortable climate in New York. Carmen Miranda’s samba, Valentino’s tango, José Greco’s and La Argentinita’s flamenco, Lecuona’s piano and the romantic boleros of Mexico’s Tito Guizar, Cuba’s Arsenio and Puerto Rico’s Rafael Hernandez found a home here.

Although Latin talent remained unaffected, a change occurred in the nightclubs. The business began to distance itself from its “Spanish” identity. This was due to the fascists’ Spanish Civil War victory—a factor that caused club owners to avoid the correlation by adopting French names for venues featuring the hottest Cuban and Puerto Rican orchestra. The matchbook advertisements for the Havana-Madrid club shows only the Moro Castle and conceals the “Madrid” image. The owners, the Lopez brothers, opened a second club called Chateau Madrid at 42 W. 58th Street, just two blocks from the swanky Copacabana, when it was located at 10 E. 60th Street, in a less liberal-minded neighborhood. This matchbook showed only a French-style chateau. They obviously were aware of the political variance of the times. By their new location, they now could continue to enjoy the “Spanish” Madrid aspect, as well as their liberal West side Broadway image.

The very popular La Conga was forced to change its name to China Doll due not to the Spanish Civil War outcome, but rather due to competition from Chin Lee’s. With Machito y sus Afro-Cubanos, it still called itself “New York’s only Chinese nightclub.” This in spite of its tropical palm tree décor and shows.

El Libario left the upscale area of W. 57th Street in order to open at 884 Eight Avenue, a more liberal-minded area. The décor of El Libario changed from a very elegant raffinée display to one of jibaros and sugar cane fields, and featured the very young Celia Cruz. This move was not so much due to fickle political sensitivity as it was to better situate its accessibility to the rumba crowd.

Continuing the trend towards contrived French-titled clubs in the 1940s was the elegant Versailles at 151 E. 50th Street, where upper-crust café society enjoyed the best Latin Saturday rumba matinees. At FeFe’s Monte Carlo, 49 E. 54th Street, you found excellent rumba. “Styled and designed by Dorothy Draper,” Hollywood’s interior decorator. This interest in novel décor was inspired by the flashy zebra-striped walls of Club El Morocco. As part of an artistic awakening after World War II, it caught the attention and imagination of the club-going public, as well as the general public.

Two other Latin clubs with French inclinations were the popular La Martinique at 57 W. 57th Street, featuring José Curbelo, and the Embassy, also on 57th Street, but east, featuring Fausto Curbelo. La Martinique, owned by Ramon and Dario, two brothers, captured the rumba crowd by turning its air conditioning up more than its rivals at a time when air conditioning was just arriving on the scene in congested dance clubs.

The Latin Quarter, upstairs at 200 W. 48^th Street, had the largest dance floor and the largest Latin bands. It called itself “America’s Smartest Night Club,” with branches at Palm Island Casino, Miami Beach, and Boston. Today, you can find it presenting great bands on Madison Avenue, where you might run into Larry Harlow.

While top rumba bands played for shows that at times featured average Apache dancers from France at Gaston Edourd’s Monte Carlo, the club scene became ever more a mixed bouillabaisse. In spite of its West Houston Street location, S.O.B.’s proved that it’s not always “location, location, location.” The music is the draw. Originally Brazilian, S.O.B.’s offers West African, Haitian drums, Portugese fado, a cappella, jazz and great salsa among other attractions. The kitchen is challenged nightly to prepare menus for a variety of palate demands. With a prime location on the corner of the Empire State Building at Fifth Avenue and 34^th Street., the Riverboat, with excellent salsa, couldn’t survive with an after-work crowd, since at 11pm, the building closed for the night, discouraging attendance. Son Cubano, on W. 14^th Street, comes alive in the late-hour meat market locale, with Marin’s Latin band. The Corso, with another excellent location on E. 86^th Street, upstairs, could not survive its sordid suspicious activities. (The location of the 1940s Yumuri, with authentic Cuban sounds, was in a bad area that even great music couldn’t hide.)

A split-level club called One If By Land, Two If By Sea, situated in a coach house once owned by Aaron Burr at 17 Barrow Street, was once a restaurant called 17. In 1939, when it was the Café Latino, I shot dice in the basement with José Mangual, Sr., and the conjunto members. The very exotic Middle Eastern, early 1970s stylish Ibis Supper Club, 59 E. 54^th Street, had top Latin bands. On top of the World Trade Center, a rumba band played nightly at Windows on the World. The music from Africa Lejana had reached, in a way, its zenith.

The lowly throwaway matchbook, which is disappearing with less smoking, preserved the history of some long-gone dance clubs. At a time when a room with bath in the heart of Times Square at the new Astor Hotel charged $3 a night, there was a Latin club called Gold Coast at 249 Sullivan Street. It was advertised as being “around the corner from 50 Washington Square South. ¾ lb. Delmonico steak: 65¢; Spaghetti: 35¢.” It was there on the dance floor during a slow rumba that my father proposed to my mother. That’s the night I was born…to dance.