Samuel Hargress Jr., Owner of a Beloved Harlem Bar, Dies at 84

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/nyregion/samuel-hargress-jr-dead-coronavirus.html

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This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

At Paris Blues, a neighborhood bar at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 121st Street in Harlem, jazz or blues bands played on a tiny stage under a string of blue lights and a photograph of Malcolm X. There was always free food, like chicken and rice, in a crockpot on a table. And sitting at the bar or outside on the patio greeting customers was the owner, Samuel Hargress Jr., elegant in his signature three-piece suit, fedora and dark sunglasses.

Tourists and locals alike appreciated how Paris Blues evoked the Harlem of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. But Mr. Hargress didn’t intentionally create a time capsule. He embodied that lost world, and remained loyal to it as the city changed around him.

“This is what he put his blood, sweat and tears into,” said his son, Sam Hargress III. “He made the bar almost an extension of himself.”

Mr. Hargress died on April 10 at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital in Manhattan. He was 84. His son said the cause was complications of the novel coronavirus.

For Mr. Hargress, Paris Blues was quite literally an extension of his home. He lived in an apartment above the bar. Downstairs, patrons found within its wood-paneled walls the comfort and intimacy of a cozy living room, where they would crowd around the bar and fill a row of wooden booths that Mr. Hargress had built himself.

He fostered an egalitarian and family spirit there, employing the sisters Judith Escalante and Esther Stokes as bartenders for many years and making Sue Kelly the day manager. He once had business cards printed listing the names of every employee, including one identified as “Disco #1 Man.”

Mr. Hargress displayed a chalkboard of his regular customers’ birthdays, so they could be celebrated with cake and a singalong. Once, after a late night, he went and got his Cadillac Escalade and drove one of the regulars, Enrique Justiniano, home to his wife.

“Sam was the custodian of, the soul ambassador of, that culture of community,” the chef Marcus Samuelsson said in a phone interview. When Mr. Samuelsson moved to Harlem in 2003 with plans to open his restaurant Red Rooster Harlem, he sought out Mr. Hargress. “It didn’t matter if you came from downtown, Asia, Africa, Brooklyn,” he said. “Once you were in the bar, you were in Sam’s house.”

Mr. Samuelsson added: “And Sam was no fool. Sam owned the building. He saw ahead.”

Mr. Hargress’s enviable position as his own landlord — he bought the five-story building decades ago, reportedly for $38,000 — gave him leeway when business was slow and protected him from the real-estate pressures that had sunk his competitors. He turned down multimillion-dollar offers to sell out. And as Harlem gentrified, he greeted the changes philosophically.

“It’s not good or bad,” he said in a short 2010 documentary about the bar. “It just happened. And you cannot stop it.”

As landmarks like Seville Lounge, St. Nick’s Jazz Pub and Lenox Lounge closed, Paris Blues appeared only more unique. Performances by groups like the Les Goodson Band, which played every Wednesday night for years, packed the joint. It became a lively hangout for local musicians, and a destination for tourists, especially Europeans, who had a romanticized view of Harlem that Paris Blues fulfilled.

When Christina Kallas, a Greek-born, Harlem-based filmmaker, moved to the city eight years ago, it hardly matched the New York she had seen in movies. Then she walked into Paris Blues.

“It instantly reminded me of that place of my imagination,” said Ms. Kallas, who began filming inside the bar for a movie, “Paris Is in Harlem.” “It was the perfect bar.”

Samuel Hargress Jr. was born on April 9, 1936, in Demopolis, in west-central Alabama, to the Rev. Samuel Hargress Sr., a Baptist minister, and Kate Hargress.

Mr. Hargress was drafted into the Army in 1959, and upon his discharge migrated north to New York and entered the bar business, first as a bartender. He opened Paris Blues in 1969, the name partly inspired by the Harlem Hellfighters, a celebrated African-American infantry regiment in World War I that had been honored by France.

“Black soldiers who served in France were treated so much better there than at home,” Mr. Hargress was quoted as saying in an obituary in The New York Amsterdam News. “I named Paris Blues to honor the city, the soldiers and the music I grew up listening to and love.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, Paris Blues was a mainly a hangout for people from the neighborhood, providing music from a jukebox. Over time, as Mr. Hargress booked live bands and welcomed newcomers, the bar blossomed into “an international, integrated scene that was authentic,” said Rakiem Walker, one of the many musicians Mr. Hargress hired and supported.

Mr. Hargress’s influence extended beyond the bar. He helped fund block parties and other community events, and he counseled Mr. Walker and others about life matters. “He was the elder black man who could give you the shortcut knowledge about the better choice,” Mr. Walker said.

Mr. Hargress settled on a look back in the ’70s — three-piece suits in a variety of colors, snakeskin or alligator shoes, a thin mustache — and happily stuck with it, though he did sometimes substitute a big Stetson for a fedora, or what he called a “godfather hat,” of which he claimed to own as many as 46.

Despite working for more than 50 years in the nightlife business, Mr. Hargress, a man of few words, revealed in the documentary: “I don’t drink. Never drank. Don’t smoke. Never smoked.”

In addition to his son, he is survived by another son, Franklin; a daughter, Samantha Hargress; and a stepson, Michael Stewart.

Sam Hargress III said that in February and early March, as New York’s bars and restaurants temporarily closed amid the coronavirus pandemic, his father found it upsetting not to be downstairs in his beloved lounge. Though he was dutifully staying home, he fell ill.

With Mr. Hargress’s death, patrons are mourning not only a man but also a place, so intertwined were the two. His son plans to keep Paris Blues going. But no one disagrees that it won’t be the same.