R.I.P. Jay Landesman, Founder of Crystal Palace Nightclub, Mayor of Gaslight Square, Writer and All-Around Hep Cat

By Aimee Levitt Thu., Feb. 24 2011 at 9:00 AM

Jay Landesman, who founded the Crystal Palace nightclub, which became the linchpin of the Gaslight Square hipster/entertainment district, and wrote the novel The Nervous Set, which became the basis for the world's first (and only) beatnik musical, died Sunday in London. He was 91.

His son Cosmo, now a film critic for the London Sunday Times, wrote in his 2008 memoir, Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me:

My dad has had an interesting life. He's never had a job that bored him. He is an original man, a man who has opened minds and emptied a few rooms in his time ... He's taken tea with Bette Davis, cocktails with Bessie Smith and LSD with Timothy Leary. His is a life that many would envy; I know I do. And yet my dad has never thought of himself as a success, for one simple reason: he isn't a big name. His life has always lacked the imprimatur of celebrity.

If only he had stayed in St. Louis...

But to begin at the beginning:

Landesman was born Irving Ned Landesman in St. Louis in 1919. His parents, Benjamin and Beatrice, owned Landesman Galleries, an antique store on Olive Street, just east of Grand Boulevard. Jay took over the business in the late 1940s, after he finished college at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Rice University in Houston.

On buying trips to New York, Landesman became enamored of the emerging beatnik scene. He eventually moved there and founded a quarterly literary journal "by and for neurotics" called, naturally enough, Neurotica. It became an early outlet for work by Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen and Marshall McLuhan, who was then a young professor at Saint Louis University.

Courtesy of Western Historical Manuscript Collection

Jay and Fran Landesman in the late 1950s.

Also in New York, Landesman met and married Fran Deitsch, daughter of a Connecticut dress manufacturer and an aspiring songwriter. They moved back to St. Louis in 1952 with the idea of opening a nightclub. Landesman's older brother Fred joined in the venture, and the Crystal Palace made its debut in a former gay bar at 3516 Olive, furnished largely with antiques poached from Landesman Galleries.

KWMU-FM theater and film reviewer Joe Pollack was an early regular. As he recalled to Dennis Brown in Brown's wonderful 2004 Riverfront Times feature story, "Beat Regeneration",

Jay was a kind of overarching Rasputin. He enjoyed being a raconteur. To borrow a line from Noel Coward, he had a talent to amuse. I don't think [Fred] used as much dope as Jay did. He didn't have an open marriage like Jay and Fran did. He seemed to be a sane and sober guide to what was going on.

In 1957, the Crystal Palace moved west, to 4240 Olive, in the heart of what was becoming known as Gaslight Square, what St. Louisans boasted was their version of Greenwich Village. It's unlikely that anyone in the original Village felt threatened, but Landesman coaxed many of its denizens, including Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis and the very young, pre-diva Barbra Streisand to perform at the Palace.

Tags:

beatniks, Crystal Palace, Fran Landesman, Gaslight Square, Jay Landesman, The Nervous Set

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Subject: Please support our call for an inquiry into the Groucho Club forum child pornography network

We are writing to you as a person of conscience who cares about the welfare and wellbeing of abused children and the parents of missing children. We are asking you to support a full independent inquiry into one of the largest child pornography networks in UK historyThe Groucho Club is a media club at No 45 Dean Street Soho London with almost 5000 members drawn mostly from the media and entertainment industry. In November 2010 a massive network of child pornographers was discovered operating on the Groucho Clubs members' forum. The Groucho Club website forum was operating on such a huge scale with 42,348 members, 663,709 topics and 900,987 posts

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In order to find those responsible for destroying the evidence it is crucial that a full independent inquiry is carried out. We would therefore ask to search your conscience and to support our call for a full independent inquiry of the case and to hold the management of the Groucho club accountable Please send an email to allwholisten@gmail.com and make a comment to support the call for an independent inquiryJustice must not only be done it must be seen to be doneThank you for your supportMartha May (a concerned parent)More about this storyhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/poli...http://www.pressreleasepoint.c...http://www.pressreleasepoint.c...