The "after-hours club" is a fixture of the African American ghetto. It
is a semisecret, unlicensed "spot" where "regulars" and "tourists"
mingle with "hustlers" to buy and use drugs long after regular bars are
closed and the party has ended for the "squares." After-hours clubs are
found in most cities, but for people outside of their particular milieu,
they are formidably difficult to identify and even more difficult to
access.
The sociologist Terry Williams returns to the cocaine culture of Harlem
in the 1980s and '90s with an ethnographic account of a club he calls Le
Boogie Woogie. He explores the life of a cast of characters that
includes regulars and bar workers, dealers and hustlers, following
social interaction around the club's active bar, with its colorful staff
and owner and the "sniffers" who patronize it. In so doing, Williams
delves into the world of after-hours clubs, exploring their longstanding
function in the African American community as neighborhood institutions
and places of autonomy for people whom mainstream society grants few
spaces of freedom. He contrasts Le Boogie Woogie, which he visited in
the 1990s, with a Lower East Side club, dubbed Murphy's Bar, twenty
years later to show how "cool" remains essential to those outside the
margins of society even as what it means to be "cool" changes. Le
Boogie Woogie is an exceptional ethnographic portrait of an underground
culture and its place within a changing city.
