A Woman's Place: The Importance Of Mary Lou Williams' Harlem Apartment
You won't find Mary Lou Williams' apartment on the historical register or visit it during one of the many tours that have economically revitalized Harlem. From the outside, 63 Hamilton Terrace looked like many of the brownstones that architecturally defined Harlem's landscape. Inside, however, a generation of young artists met, woodshedded new music and etched out a progressive, radical agenda that would shift the music world off its axis and challenge listeners to rethink their sonic understandings of jazz.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Harlem was full of places that nightly served a menu of music, social freedom, kinetic and sexual energy. There was the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets, which functioned as the birthplace of modern social dance culture and the site of the historic "battle of the bands." The Apollo Theater on West 125th Street, where amateur performers tested their talents in front of unforgiving audiences. Minton's Playhouse, Monroe's Uptown House, Small's Paradise and the other small nightclubs that jazz musicians rushed to after their regular paying gigs. While all of these spaces shaped important aspects of jazz's history, they also perpetuated the notion that paradigm-shifting experimentation was male-centered, cultivated in isolation or only occurred in these public spaces. Mary Lou Williams' apartment on 63 Hamilton Terrace was as important as any of these spaces in advancing the evolution of jazz and the survival of musicians.
Most of us have heard the cliché, "a woman's place is in the home." This axiom gained popularity in the post-war years in counter-response to the overwhelming economic and social freedom women experienced during the World War II and the emergence of the women's movement in the late 1960s. The phrase originated with the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 467 B.C. In the play "Seven Against Thebes" Aeschylus wrote, "Let the woman stay at home and hold their peace." In 1732, Thomas Fuller declared, in , "a woman is to be from her house three times: when she is christened, married,
