Due to their convictions and incarcerations, the NYPD revoked the cabaret cards of both Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk. Without cabaret cards, neither artist could work in any New York City establishment that sold alcohol, which eliminated every venue in the epicenter of jazz. Monk and Lady Day were barred from lucrative gigs on Fifty-Second Street—which boasted so many jazz clubs that it was nicknamed “Swing Street”—and from Harlem clubs like Minton’s Playhouse, where Monk got his start as the house pianist in 1941.
Although the NYPD did not start requiring musicians to have cabaret cards until 1940, the law had its origins in Prohibition-era New York City. During the 1920s, Harlem became a mecca for Black artists, writers, and musicians. Harlem clubs attracted high-society white people who came to mix with artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and to indulge in the illicit thrill of mingling across the rigid color line. As detailed in the legislative history of the cabaret card law, New York politicians panicked at the thought that tourists or naive (white) New Yorkers would “run wild” in New York clubs and dance halls after rubbing elbows with people of “poor moral character,” and in 1926 legislation was passed requiring that the character of every staff person who worked in entertainment venues such as clubs and dance halls pass muster with the NYPD. The original legislation addressed permanent workers such as maître d’s, waiters, and kitchen staff. In 1940, at the urging of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the law’s scope was expanded to monitor musicians who appeared at any venue that served alcohol, regardless of whether their employment was a one-week engagement or as part of the house band.
In 1941, the union covering bartenders and hotel and restaurant workers sued the NYPD to invalidate the cabaret card law. In Friedman v. Valentine, the union challenged the entire cabaret card scheme as exceeding the scope of the police department’s authority. The union also argued that the requirement that all applicants seeking work in restaurants, dance halls, cabarets, and nightclubs pay the police department a $2 application fee and be fingerprinted violated their due process rights by imposing an undue burden on their ability to find employment.
The court blithely dismissed both arguments. Justice Ferdinand Pecora of the New York State Supreme Court endorsed the New York City Council’s view that workers in dance halls and cabarets were uniquely positioned to take advantage of patrons. The court stated that the test of a law’s constitutionality was “whether an evil exists and whether there is a logical relation between the eradication of the evil and the enactment of regulations intended to cure the condition.”