Block 17 of Jitu Weusi Weeksville Oral History (Q25859)

 
 Jitu Weusi: Brooklyn was coming along… First of all, Brooklyn had a lot of things going on club-wise – bars, clubs… When I was at the newsstand, the Putnam Central Club was hot then. I used to hear Lefty [Morris], my cousin, and all those guys – Willie Jones – talking about ‘aw man, we’re gonna hear so and so at the PCC [Putnam Central]… that was the Putnam

Central Club. But I was 13; back in those days they didn’t play around with these liquor laws and all that stuff, so that was off-limits to you if you were… I was 13 and looked 13, so I was never able to go to those places, even though I used to hear Lefty [Morris] and them talk about the PCC [Putnam Central], Tony’s [Grand Dean] on Grand Avenue, the place up on Halsey and Reed [Turbo Village]… I used to hear them talk about these various clubs all over the place, but I couldn’t go to these places. I remember one time I tried to go to The Continental, and I looked in there and who did I see but my other cousin, who was a cop named Raymond, he was a traffic policeman. Here I am peeping in the door and he’s sitting in the back there, so I got the message ‘don’t mess around.’ My mother always made us very, very conscious about the law and things you weren’t supposed to do, etc., so I was pretty aware of what I wasn’t supposed to do and where I wasn’t supposed to be. Yes, there was a very active jazz scene in Brooklyn during that period.