Lady Luci's Cocktail Lounge, Harlem USA
by Susan Kruglinski
Lady Luci dragged tables across the floor and tossed chairs into place. She was transforming her cocktail lounge from a swing-dance floor with room for an entire traditional big band to a casual scattering of tables for her very first unsigned talent night. A couple of older gentlemen and one young man sat drinking at the bar. Everyone else in the place was working for Luci, setting up for the rest of the night.
Across the street were the Magic Theatres, part of the Harlem USA mall, which is often touted as the core of the recent Harlem revival. Young people gathered with tickets for the new Austin Powers movie, or Men in Black II. They filed into dark rooms to sit for two hours or more before the latest Hollywood spectacle.
When the shows are over, the pleasure seekers who patronize the megaplex, with its flashing red electronic marquee, do not seem to notice the modest entertainment option on the opposite corner of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 124th Street. Perhaps in the night it is difficult to discern the carved wooden sign above the entrance of Lady Luci's Cocktail Lounge, hand-painted pink and sprinkled with craft-store glitter by Luci herself.
"It helped me out better when it was being built," Lady Luci said of the nine-screen theater. She explained that during construction she would make lunch for the electricians.
"The electricians told the ironworkers. The ironworkers told the plumbers. I had people in here every day."
It was just after 9 p.m., early for business even on a Thursday night at Lady Luci's. The lights in the lounge were still bright, and the old pink walls and pink lace window curtains surrounding the tables were cheery like a little girl's room. Strings of tiny, peachy-pink lights were duct taped to the edges of the ceiling.
"For girls, it's cool," said promoter Rahmel Taylor, who was organizing the night's entertainment. "But a lot of guys will be like, 'What's up with this pink?'"
The small stage was enclosed by a white-painted, scalloped wood railing, and a cardboard American flag was taped to the back wall. It was almost like the stage where a barber shop quartet would sing in fifties-era America, except the grimy linoleum floor was peeling up and two shoulder-high speakers flanked the edges.
Across the room snaked a mammoth, curvy oak bar, surrounded by dark blue walls and a wall-to-wall mirror. Tiny strings of lights and upside-down wine glasses hung from the ceiling like stalactites.
As the evening wore on and a few nightcrawlers trickled in, someone dimmed the chandeliers, and the lounge glittered like a pink and blue Christmas.
Lady Luci put away a can of Nu-Foam liquid detergent and came to a rest behind the bar. Wearing bookish glasses and with her hair swept up, she leaned against the edge and nodded towards a conspicuously clean-cut white guy with a video camera. He was sitting at the bar by himself, downing a beer.
"That guy!" she laughed. "I didn't know if he was a comedian or for real. But when I saw him..."
A fine-featured man with sun-crinkled eyes, recently transplanted to Queens from a suburb of San Diego, he was wearing white pants and a clean gray T-shirt that said, in neat, collegiate letters, "Spitfire."
He and 20 other acts, responding to an ad in the Village Voice, had come in for an audition at Lady Luci's last Tuesday. Tonight he was to be part of Luci's first weekly "Catch a Rising Star."
He was one of three acts who actually showed up for the big night.
He had been sitting at the bar since 6:30 p.m., the time he was told to get there. He was scheduled to be the second performer. It was now approaching 10 p.m.
"No, this isn't a comedy act," the young man, Rian Hoover, also known as The Infinite, Mr. Spit, and The Wizard on the Mix, said in a matter-of-fact tone. "This is straight rap."
"We wanna thank all 12 of you motherfuckers for coming out," said Brooklyn Mike, the MC of the show, perched on the stage with a small cordless microphone. "We just need about 200 more motherfuckers and we'll be all right."
Brooklyn Mike, a professional comedian, worked the room with gratuitous swear words and light-hearted shock humor about strippers with asthma and white people in Harlem. With affable charm, he cracked a joke about almost every person in the room.
"Look, no booing and no heckling," he warned, pulling out the list of three performers. "If you don't like it, you try and bring your ass up here."
He squinted to read the first name, and called out, "Rian. Rian Hoover."
The Infinite looked startled. His head zipped back and forth, as if looking for some kind of confirmation that this was a mistake.
Finally, he handed his home-made compact disc to the DJ and stood before the cardboard flag.
Dark-sounding synthesizer and bass filled the speakers. Strutting the stage, with the mike smashed against his mouth, he introduced himself in his many aliases, tightening his voice.
"Raise it up, yo."
His soundtrack was a medley of the instrumental bits of popular hip-hop songs, and his rap was a pastiche of clichéd black-influenced slang.
"Whooop whooop whooop," he cried, as he pumped the air with his fist and chanted of bitches, ho's, and getting ripped on blunts.
Broad smiles erupted. It seemed everyone in the place at once exchanged a wide-eyed look of amusement. Many snapped their heads back with a laugh and a clap.
For seven minutes, Rian Hoover was a man transformed, seemingly possessed by the spirit of an MTV-stereotyped ghetto rapper.
The audience applauded delightedly when he was through.
"You gotta give it to that crazy motherfucker," Brooklyn Mike said, obviously awed by The Infinite. "You fucked me up."
Lady Luci, standing at the end of the bar with her arms crossed, was transfixed by the show, grinning and laughing along with her evening guests.
"I really didn't want to get my own place," Luci Hicks Troiano said of the origin of her cocktail lounge. "I didn't want the headaches, and it's been a hassle since then."
Troiano speaks in a deadpan manner, even when she is joking about her husband's need for a haircut, or referring to people as a pain in the butt. She complains often, but in a casual tone that belies her frustrations.
An attractive, polished woman, even when wearing jeans and a T-shirt advertising a liqueur, she still has a gentle Caribbean accent from her childhood in St. Kitts. She arrived in the United States right out of high school in 1968, after a visiting family convinced her to be their nanny in New Jersey. She moved to New York City in 1970 because "this was where the glitz was."
"I really wanted to be a singer," she said. "I had a beautiful voice before I smoked these damn cigarettes."
A Harlem resident since 1975, she became entrenched in the neighborhood club scene, working as a bartender at such legendary night spots as the Ever Popular Baby Grand and Vincent's Place, and as a manager at Chazz, which included the well-known Old Palm Cafe.
Her future husband, Robert Troiano, impressed with her night life savvy, convinced her to run his new investment, a cocktail lounge. They opened in 1988.
"We've had to close down at least three times," Lady Luci said.
The lounge had auspicious beginnings, after Robert Troiano bought the run-down building that formerly housed a small bar, a liquor store and a jewelry store. They were able to knock down walls and design the unique space themselves.
"When I opened this place it was a mess," Luci Troiano said. She proceeded to have windows cut into the walls, installed multiple chandeliers, painted the inside pink and the outside peach.
"That's me, " she said. "That's my lady's touch. Every bar I went to was dark and gloomy. I didn't want that."
The lounge began hosting live music almost every night of the week, including such budding talent as jazz saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood and a young Mary J. Blige.
"She was so shy," said Troiano. "That was before Mary was Mary."
In her kitchen at home, Lady Luci would cook complimentary buffets for patrons that might include fried chicken, baked macaroni, or Swedish meatballs.
She worked as bartender, purchaser, accountant, and manager. And she still does. Many nights she still padlocks the door herself at 4 a.m.
It was early Friday night, and Vetty Lewis dashed from behind the bar towards the dance floor as soon as Solomon Burke's "There's Good Rockin' at Midnight" started playing on the jukebox. She has been a "mixologist" at Lady Luci's for three years, and is the person to ask if you want to know where the best jazz music is playing in Harlem. She started dancing with one of the members of Hai Rezolution, the Afro-Caribbean Jazz band that was performing that night at Lady Luci's.
Over in the corner, the trumpet player made warm-up fluttering sounds with his instrument as he bounced his head to the beat, and the drummer was joining in with the recorded music. As other musicians arrived at the lounge, they danced their way through the door.
The jukebox music changed to salsa, and Lewis continued to dance as she pulled down the window shades and swung back behind the bar.
"I love it," bass player James Taylor said of performing at Lady Luci's every Friday night. "But nobody knows we're here yet. We like to call this 'super dress rehearsal.'"
Taylor, a conductor on the One Train and son of an original member of the Soul Stirrers, the band that launched the career of Sam Cooke, is one of the five founding members of Hai Rezolution. They have been together in varying forms for about 30 years.
With its nine or so members, depending on who shows, the band trickled into the lounge for over two hours. By 11:30 p.m., they finally decided to start playing with the group incomplete and the audience sparse.
Dwight Brewster, the band's leader, in a fresh button-down shirt (mostly unbuttoned) and short dred locks, began the show with a special tune for Vetty Lewis.
The group burst into a tight, brassy mambo version of "Happy Birthday," transforming the tired old song into pure electricity.
Lewis again flew from the bar and exploded on the dance floor. The scattered folks at the bar and tables sang along and clapped. Everyone got a slice of banana and strawberry cake.
Later, as the guests cha-cha-ed and more band members filled the space, Lady Luci arrived in an off-the-shoulder black blouse with a lit cigarette.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Lady Luci!" Brewster announced as she scurried around, attending to business, seemingly embarrassed by the acknowledgment. The small crowd of regulars cheered.
"They don't even know her talent of running a bar and making decisions," said Robert Troiano of his wife. "She's known in the neighborhood as a super barmaid."
It seems sometimes Lady Luci may have been too shrewd for the good of her business.
In the early '90s, Troiano decided to boost profits by turning the place into a dance club.
"A DJ is much cheaper than a live band," she said.
After successfully attracting customers with American dance music, Troiano decided to try what she calls "Jamaican disco."
"Big mistake," she said. "They closed me down."
Profits soared, but the problems mounted.
"Caribbean folks are wild party-goers," she said. "They'd break stuff, there would be overcrowding, police. The task force would come by every night. There was so much tension, I hired security."
People banged on the walls, broke the door, and even set off the sprinkler system just for fun.
"But I never had a shooting," she said proudly. "Either in here or outside my place."
Eventually, in 1994, Troiano decided she had to close the lounge down for a while, to cool things off.
She spent this time raising her youngest child, a daughter named Ashia.
"I was really a good mother then," she jokes. She had already raised a daughter and two sons, one of whom she adopted. He had been a childhood friend of her son, and had lost his mother as a young teen.
In 1999, Lady Luci reopened her business, with a small budget and a vision of a more dignified cocktail lounge.
Every Monday night for the last three years, the Harlem Renaissance Orchestra, a 16-piece big band, has played swing music at Lady Luci's. Together for over 20 years, and with eight original members, the band includes a fireman, a computer specialist, someone who just passed the bar exam, and every one with a degree in music. Dressed in anything from baseball caps and polo shirts to dinner jackets, tonight they were a motley-looking crew.
"It's a United Nations kind of thing," said Ron Allen, the band's leader, looking over his group. "We've got someone from Japan, from Italy, England...let's see...Sudan, France, and New Jersey."
After she set up the tins filled with homemade chicken and rice over lit sternos, Lady Luci headed home to change into her evening wear, leaving Lewis to make sure everyone was having a good time.
The band set itself up in three rows, music stands and sheet music spilling onto the tiny dance floor. One large table filled up with young people with British accents and a rake thin elderly man in a straw fedora and a bamboo print shirt. They made up the bulk of the audience for the night. The man was Brother Leroy, a regular, and he was flirting shamelessly with the young women.
Ron Allen stood before the band and started snapping his fingers. In seconds the squeal of saxes and trumpets filled the room. The young brits immediately took the floor, spinning and swinging in choreographed moves, smiles plastered to their faces.
They were the Jive Lindy Hoppers from London, and they were in town to perform by the fountain at Lincoln Center later that week. They took over Lady Luci's -- an unexpected British invasion in Harlem.
Brother Leroy, who had been a professional tap dancer in Harlem in the late 1930's, seemed invigorated by this rush of young energy.
"Get down!" he called out to a woman in a swirling skirt. "Get down, baby!"
"It takes a lot of people to fill this place up," said Troiano. "I can't make it on 10 people a day."
"Business could be better," said her husband, who has been a neighborhood resident for 52 years. "This is not the old Harlem that we had before. But those that want to come, they know it's here."
Perhaps the Hue-Man Bookstore, one of the nation's largest African-American bookstores, which just opened up next to the Magic Theatres, will attract an older crowd that may take notice of the cocktail lounge's unique offerings.
And possibly the younger folks will catch on to "Catch a Rising Star," which gained momentum the next week when it attracted more new acts.
"I like the challenge," said Troiano. "And the prestige. It's exciting, it's glamorous."
But she does hope that the "Harlem revival" might jump the street and revive her business sooner than later.
"The bills come in," she said. "It's depressing."
At the moment, however, Troiano's humble footnote in the history of Harlem night life remains open for business.
"We'll see if it picks up," she said. "As long as I can push it as far as I can..."