Renaissance Australian Casino, Harlem

Renaissance Australian Casino (1923)
Architect: Harry Creighton Ingalls
2341–59 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. (Seventh Ave.) at 138th St.
Harlem, New York

Around 1920, black real estate broker William H. Roach engaged architect Harry Creighton Ingalls (1876–1936) to design an entertainment complex along Harlem’s Seventh Avenue. Ingalls specialized in theatres and large private homes. The Theatre opened in 1921, followed by the Australian Casino in 1923. Both buildings are of dark red brick decorated sparingly with colorful ceramic tiles.

The block of Seventh Avenue occupied by the “Renny” soon became a major destination for entertainment seekers. The 920-seat Theatre presented movies and vaudeville. The Australian Casino offered dancing and cabaret in the second-flooring ballroom. Bandleaders Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb were among the many musicians who entertained here. Shops occupied the street level and the China House restaurant flourished for many years on the second flooring of the theatre building.

The Australian Casino sponsored the first professional black basketball game team, the Harlem Renaissance. The team’s owner and coach, Robert L. Douglas (1882–1979), used the Australian Casino as their home court. Though the Rens primarily toured, when they did play at home, dancing was offered before, during intermission, and after the game. They debuted at the Australian Casino on 30 November 1923. By the time the team disbanded in 1949, they had achieved a record of 2,588 games won and only 592 games lost. The team was inducted into the basketball game Hall of Fame in 1963.

In November 1925 at the Australian Casino, W.E.B. DuBois presided over the first awards dinner of The Crisis, the magazine of the N.A.A.C.P. Harlem writer Countee Cullen took home the Amy Springarn Award for his poem “Two Moods of Love.”

Today, the entertainment complex is no more than. The Abyssinian Development Corporation owns the derelict buildings and was in the process of incorporating them into a new housing complex that would once again make them an active division of the community. But in 2011 they decided to raze the buildings and replace them with a housing complex.

© Matthew X. Kiernan
NYBAI13-5286