Meet Me at the Theresa: The Story of Harlem's Most Famous Hotel

The writing is prosaic, but the stories are anything but: the 13 floors of the Hotel Theresa, located at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem, witnessed an incredible panoply of African-American life and history, and anthologist Wilson (who is an associate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard) has pulled together a remarkable collection of anecdotes centered around the building. Opened in 1912, by 1940 the Theresa was the major see-and-be-seen destination for African-Americans, who were often forced to use services elevators and order room service if they stayed in supposedly integrated hotels downtown. The 28 b&w photos included in this volume show everyone from Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Joe Louis to Sugar Ray Robinson, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. (Many of them have the mannered, close-to-the-vest look of most""candid"" publicity shots from the mid-century.) Wilson has stories on them all, from Louis's womanizing (to the point of collecting opinions on his endowment) to Thurgood Marshall's stops at the hotel's coffee shop before heading downtown to the NAACP offices (three former denizens attest that these stops were just""showstopping""). Wilson's conceit of using the Theresa to telescope mid-century black life works beautifully, but her hardboiled journalese can be wearying:""Looking battered and decrepit like a used-up prostitute, she the Theresa had aged without grace or dignity"" by the time of Fidel Castro's visit to the hotel in 1960. The hotel closed 10 years later, but in this brassy yet deeply respectful book, it has something of a memento, if not a resurrection.