Rent Parties in Harlem
In a recent post, I showed a photo of a rent party in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. The bohemians of that era got the idea from the parties held in Harlem from the 1920s through the 1950s.
Guests paid a fee to enter the host's apartment and dance to the music provided (live bands before the war, records after). Food was extra. The host(s) used the proceeds to pay the rent.
The tickets issued for rent parties, which the hosts handed out to friends and even strangers, interested Langston Hughes. “When I first came to Harlem," he wrote in 1957, "as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”
The collection now lives in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University, along with Hughes's other papers.
In the 1920s, competition for guests was fierce, because as many as a dozen parties might be held on the same block, and as many as five per building. One ticket from 1927 said:
Save your tears for a rainy day,
We are giving a party where you can play
With red-hot mammas and too bad She-bas
Who wear their dresses above their knees
And mess around with whom they please.
During Prohibition, of course, bootleg liquor flowed freely. Some parties had back rooms for gambling and drug use, and couples could sometimes rent one for themselves—for a price.
The term "rent party" never appeared on these tickets, which used euphemisms such as "social party" or "social whist party."
Hughes enjoyed going to these parties more than those thrown by artists and intellectuals. He wrote:
The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and good fried fish or steaming chitterling were sold at very low prices. And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went on until dawn came in at the windows.
Photos: Slate magazine and Open Culture
