in New York. Numbers of those who love to shine by the light
reflected from celebrities were always to be found. The first
modern jazz band ever heard in New York, or, perhaps anywhere, was organized at The Marshall. It was a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making the first dominant use of
banjos, saxophones, clarinets and trap drums in combination,
and was called The Memphis Students. Jim Europe was a
member of that band, and out of it grew the famous Clef
Club, of which he was the noted leader, and which for a long
ime monopolized the business of “entertaining” private parties
and furnishing music for the new dance craze. Also in the
Clef Club was "Buddy" Gilmore who originated trap drumming as it is now practised, and set hundreds of white men to
juggling their sticks and doing acrobatic stunts while they
manipulated a dozen other noise-making devices aside from
their drums. A good many well-known white performers frequented The Marshall and for seven or eight years the place
was one of the sights of New York.
The move to Fifty-third Street was the result of the opportunity to get into newer and better houses. About 1900 the move to Harlem began, and for the same reason. Harlem had been overbuilt with large, new-law apartment houses, but rapid transportation to that section was very inadequate—the Lenox Avenue Subway had not yet been built—and landlords were finding difficulty in keeping houses on the east side of the section filled. Residents along and near Seventh Avenue were fairly well served by the Eighth Avenue Elevated. A colored man, in the real estate business at this time, Philip A. Payton, approached several of these landlords with the proposition that he would fill their empty or partially empty houses with steady colored tenants. The suggestion was accepted, and one or two houses on One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street east of Lenox Avenue were taken over. Gradually other houses were filled. The whites paid little attention to the movement until it began to spread west of Lenox Avenue; they then took steps to check it. They proposed through a financial organization, the Hudson Realty Company, to buy in all properties occupied by colored people and evict the
