The Deuces and the Manhattan Casino
Near St Petersburg, Florida
During the long decades of segregation, Twenty-second Street South was the beating heart of Black Saint Petersburg. Locals called it the Deuces, for the double twos in its name, and it was a self-sufficient corridor of Black-owned barbershops, groceries, doctors, and dance halls, built because the white city downtown was closed to them. Its crown jewel was the Manhattan Casino, a two-story hall constructed in nineteen twenty-five by a Black entrepreneur named Elder Jordan.
When touring musicians came through, they could not play the whites-only venues downtown, so they played here. And so this modest brick building on the Deuces hosted some of the greatest names in American music, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, and Sarah Vaughan among them, part of the network of Black venues that history remembers as the Chitlin Circuit. Then came a double blow.
Integration, for all its promise, drew Black patrons and dollars away to the newly opened downtown, and the construction of Interstate Two Seventy-Five carved directly through the neighborhood, displacing homes and businesses. The Deuces faded. But the Manhattan Casino still stands, restored, a surviving witness to a community that built its own joy when the wider city shut its doors.
