Blue Note site

Welcome to the driving part of the tour, and to a stretch of Philadelphia most maps have forgotten. You're at 15th and Ridge Avenue, and in the late 1940s and early '50s this was the Blue Note — described in its day as the town's swankiest jazz emporium. Ridge Avenue here was the heart of what people called the Golden Strip: block after block of clubs and theatres, a whole entertainment district of Black Philadelphia. Almost none of it survived urban renewal. You have to be told it was here to believe it.

The Blue Note is a genuine, documented chapter of Billie Holiday's Philadelphia — no legend required. The owner, Jack Fields, brought her in three or four times a year, and he left us the perfect line about what she meant to this room. He said, simply, “She packed them in just to look at her.” Not just to hear her — to look at her. By this point in her life the voice was weathered and the story was heavy, and audiences came partly to be in the presence of it all.

And she was in serious company on this stage. The house band was led by the young Philadelphia pianist Ray Bryant, and that band backed Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie — the names that were remaking American music, right here on a street you'd now drive past without a second look.

This is the first of three driving stops, and the geography opens up from here. Your next stop is a rowhouse in Strawberry Mansion with a landmark inside it. Use the map link on your screen for turn-by-turn directions to the John Coltrane House.