by Rose Vance-Grom
While Howard Street is our main focus in class, we would be missing out on a lot of jazz history if we didn’t look beyond it. The Palace Theater was located on Main and High Streets in Downtown Akron from 1926-1966 and I’ve been conducting research to add it to the Green Book Cleveland site. The Palace featured live stage shows and they also screened movies. I found that advertising for the Palace used both “theater” and “theatre” interchangeably, so I was searching for both terms. Those searches led me to many advertisements for various movies being shown there, but nothing in the way of concerts or live shows.
I accidentally stumbled across a poster for a Cab Calloway show at the Palace while doing research for a different venue, the Cotton Club at 50 N. Howard Street. The Cotton Club was also the name of a legendary jazz nightclub in Harlem, New York from the 1920s-1940s. Some of the most prominent Black entertainers of this era got their start at the Cotton Club, including Cab Calloway. Calloway played with his “Cotton Club Orchestra” when we traveled, which is how I found the poster for his show.
From this, I found that the Palace advertised their live shows as the “Palace Stage” instead of the “Palace Theater” which they used for their movie screenings. With that information, I found posters for many shows at the Palace during the 1940s, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong.
When people talk and write about Howard Street, these big-name entertainers always come up. These posters are some of the most concrete evidence I have come across that proves they did in fact play in Akron. Finding these posters felt like a huge breakthrough because now we have historical sources to back up the popular legends of this era.
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