A Woman to Know: Ada Smith
I'm a personality. Nobody ever came to hear me. They came to see me. — Ada
(image via Jack Robinson Archive)
In 1929, Ada Smith opened Bricktop's ("Chez Bricktop," she insisted), a nightclub on 66 rue Pigalle in Paris.
People tell gorgeous stories about Bricktop's — the night John Steinbeck was kicked out (he apologized by sending a taxi full of roses to Ada the next day), the month Ada hired Langston Hughes as a busboy, the times Cole Porter would show up and teach guests the Charleston.
"I'm not really social," Ada liked to say. "I like people. But I like them at Bricktop's."
Add to your library list:
Bricktop by Bricktop (Jim Haskins)
Bricktop's Paris: African American Women in Paris Between the Two Wars (Tracy Whiting)
Harlem in Montmartre (William A. Shack)
Read more:
Ada "Bricktop" Smith (Black Past)
To Bricktop, on Her Belated Birthday (The Paris Review)
Ada "Bricktop" Smith, Once the Grand Dame of Paris Nightclub Scene (The Root)
Bricktop, Cabaret Queen in Paris and Rome (The New York Times)
A Night at Bricktop's: Jazz in 1930s Montmartre (Stanford University)
Fabulous Dead People: Bricktop (W Magazine)
Harlem Heroes (Smithsonian)
Cabaret Queen, Bricktop is Dead (Huntington Herald-Dispatch)
300 attend service for the Bricktop (The New York Times)
** Send your own recommendations for women to know! Reply to this newsletter with your lady and she could be featured in an upcoming edition. You can browse the archive here. **