Chicago Defender, December 2, 1933

Compiled by memory and with the help of  some found news clippings, University of Chicago alumnus Leon H. Lewis’s (A.B. ’28) Map of Chicago’s South Side Jazz Clubs ca. 1925-1940 from the Chicago Jazz Archives at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago is a real topographical gem.  Lewis, a musician himself, was active in the music scene at the UofC, performing the banjo at fraternity events and dances on campus during his undergraduate career.  It appears, since he compiled his map from memory at the age of 80, that he was also a true jazz connoisseur, frequenting the clubs himself and most likely watching jazz greats like Louis Armstrong perform at the Sunset Cafe at 315-317 E. 35th Street with Armstrong’s band, the Sunset Stompers.

Deborah Gillaspie, Curator of the Chicago Jazz Archive, writes about how popular Lewis’s original 11″ x 17″ map was in its original form, and laments the difficulty of making it available to researchers abroad. “There have been jazz maps over the years — Paul Eduard Miller’s map on the endpapers of the 1946 Esquire Jazz Book comes to mind — but nothing as complete as Mr. Lewis’s, nor anything concentrating on the South Side venues,” she writes.  The map, in its new format, provides an interactive feature, where numbered locations direct to individual pages that feature historical paraphernalia from its heyday.