Lenox Lounge (American Gangster)

For 73 years, the corner of Lenox Avenue and 124th Street glowed with neon. The Lenox Lounge was Harlem's Art Deco jazz palace: red leather booths, curving walls, and a room striped like a zebra, where Billie Holiday held court and Denzel Washington once made a very important phone call. The building itself is gone — but the story is worth hunting down.

The Scene

Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007) charts the rise and fall of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the Harlem kingpin of the late 1960s and early '70s. Early on, Lucas stands at a phone booth outside the Lenox Lounge's red-paneled facade and calls his "cousin" in Bangkok — the call that sets his Southeast Asia pipeline in motion. A small scene with enormous consequences, and the Lounge plays itself: neon sign, Art Deco curves, pure 1930s Harlem glamour standing in for the late 1960s.

One thing, hunted down fair and square: the Lenox Lounge was not Frank's headquarters in the movie. His "unofficial HQ" is "Lucille's," the corner café — Scott has said that was the one thing the production built from scratch, a set at Lenox Avenue and 122nd Street. The Lounge is the real deal, playing itself.

The Backstory

The Lenox Lounge opened in 1939 at 288 Lenox Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard), between 124th and 125th Streets. Inside, the Art Deco interior was crowned by the Zebra Room, whose zebra-striped walls made it one of the most photographed bar interiors in New York.

Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie all played here — or, in Holiday's case, held a famous regular table — while Harlem Renaissance writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, and a young Malcolm X, were regulars in the booths.

The club faded as the neighborhood struggled, then got a second life after owner Alvin Reid, Sr. bought it in 1988 and completed a $600,000 restoration of the Art Deco interior in 2000. The comeback was real — New York Magazine and the Zagat Survey both named it among the city's best nightlife — but it couldn't outrun the rent. When the lease jumped from $10,000 to $20,000 a month, the Lounge poured its last drinks on December 31, 2012. The interior was stripped, plans to reopen two blocks north at 333 Lenox Avenue never came together, and in May 2017 the building was demolished. A bank occupies the site today.

What to Look For

Stand at Lenox Avenue and 124th Street and look for the bank — that's where the neon sign once blazed. The booth is long gone, but the vantage point is Scott's camera angle. Film-geek bonus: in the movie, one business across the road is advertising its website — in the late 1960s. An anachronism worth a smirk.

For a two-for-one hunt, head ten blocks south to Lenox and 122nd, where "Lucille's" was built as a set against the brownstone corner — the film's version of Frank's HQ — and Tango (Idris Elba) gets taken out a few doors down 122nd Street. Across the street stands St. Martin's Church (230 Lenox), which played the Narcotics Bureau's abandoned-church headquarters. Same block, both sides of the law.

Getting There

Address: 288 Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard), between 124th & 125th Streets, Harlem. Subway: take the 2 or 3 to 125th Street, then walk one block south on Lenox Avenue to 124th. (The 4/5/6 to 125th Street at Lexington is a longer walk west.)

Trivia

• The Zebra Room appeared in a key scene of the Mad Men pilot, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."
• Madonna filmed her "Secret" music video inside the Lounge.
• Denzel Washington walked these floors in two films: Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) and American Gangster (2007).
• John Singleton's 2000 remake of Shaft, starring Samuel L. Jackson, shot scenes here too.
• Voted "Best of the Best" nightlife by both New York Magazine and the Zagat Survey (2001–2002).

The Hunt Clue

Where zebra stripes once lined the wall,
And jazz greats answered Harlem's call,
Frank rang Bangkok from a booth outside —
Now a bank stands there, but the legend's alive.

Photo: Hans Joachim Dudeck via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)