Talk:Black Banana

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Xavier's input
Xavier Hussenet has been trying to add to this page, not exactly understanding Wikipedia's methodology.

His text is as follows:

"I, Xavier François Hussenet, met Garrick when I was 18 and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. We lived in a commune on South Street called Gazoo. We were hippies, but Garrick had a real job as a buyer at Strawbridge & Clothier, while I was painting people’s feet at sit-ins and festivals, designing my own Tarot cards, and cooking potluck at the South Street Co-op. When I turned 20 I went to Garrick and asked him to open a Cafe, and call it La Banane Noire in tribute to Josephine Baker, the expatriate outspoken Black Jazz singer who wore a banana girdle in her exotic sing and dance shows. I am from France, grew up in Paris, and moved to Manhattan with my mother when I was 12 years old. I came on the SS France and the first thing I saw was the Statue of Liberty. Anyhow, La Banane Noire was a success and grew rapidly from its humble origins at 4th and South with next door neighbor Lickety Split, started by 2 of our old roommates, John Weselyk and Dale Shuffler. OK, so we quickly got too big for the little townhouse on South Street and we moved to an old abandoned speakeasy in Philadelphia’s Skid Row, a neighborhood that subsequently got gentrified for the 1776 bicentennial, and was renamed Olde City, at 3rd and Race, one or two blocks from the rediscovered Betsy Ross house. This is 1975, we incorporated as Black Banana Inc., got the Banana theme going Art Moderne and were reviewed by the Washington Post and Architectural Digest, among others, for being the founders of the Philadelphia Restaurant Renaissance. It was an excellent boutique restaurant, we served expensive dishes, and we were very popular, but we didn’t make any money, really. So, by 1980 we made the conscious decision to start expending and becoming a night-club, phasing out the food slowly, and concentrating on the party. The first dance floor was on the second floor, while the restaurant continued on the first. Later we bought the adjacent building and Garrick named the bistro Cafe Zaza after a French clown from the Cirque Medrano in Paris, old stomping grounds of Toulouse-Lautrec. That is when all those wonderful people you can see in the videos on Facebook started to appear and things got really creative. Gigi Meoli was Garrick’s favorite model for his photo studio on the 4th floor, and I wrote copy and did layout with Adobe on the early Macs. Gigi and his brother Nicolas were the two most elegant sweet lads you can imagine, never raised their voice against anyone, just did their job quietly with a mysterious smile, and charmed the ladies. I’d like to know what happened to them, and all the others they ran with. Sometime in the mid 80s there was an electric fire caused by Garrick’s own wiring which was not according to code. The damage was mostly smoke and water, and our friends and neighbors did rally around and help rebuild the club while we were being worn down by the Insurance Company, and strapped for cash. But it was all done over with expert speed under the direction of Garrick, he was not yet diagnosed with AIDS. Garrick was a first class contractor, very talented in remodeling old buildings like this 19th century warehouse sweat shop. It is clear that we established the first presence of what was to become a bourgeois neighborhood. Garrick became really ill in the late 80s with AIDS and I became a full time caretaker. It was the most devastating and graphic experience in my life, seeing him go from a vibrant energetic and spontaneous person, to overnight dementia, and a slow malignant cancer that transformed him into a living cadaver. Acting as his advocate in the labyrinthine heath care system taught me the most important lessons in my life. In an effort to provide Garrick with the best and most peaceful life we moved to a beautiful house in Sugar Loaf Key, on the water. He died on March of 1991 peacefully at home. I was devastated to lose my oldest and dearest friend, one with whom I had worked for over 20 years. For a while I lived on a 38 foot Freedom Yacht sailboat, and took tourists out snorkeling and fishing in the coral reef of Key West. I had trained one of my security staff, an athlete from the Vesper’s club on the Schuylkill River, in whom I trusted implicitly, to run the Black Banana and offered him an opportunity to build equity in the property, now comprised of 3 buildings on the southwest corner of 3rd and Race. Negotiations dragged on for years without any of many contracts offered ever being signed. In the end management was a catastrophic failure requiring the legal intervention of Mesirov, Gelman & al., and leading to the Banana closing in 1998. The actual sequence of events is that Garrick rebuilt the club in its last and final phase, and died of AIDS only after it had been successfully launched, not the other way around. "

Might there be a suitable way to pull some of the data out of this for inclusion? Would it help if he posted his own story elsewhere and we were to reference it? Centerone (talk) 04:44, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

location
534 S 4th st is wrong. That's right around the corner from South St. The mention that Wexler Gallery is now in the same spot would place it at 201 North 3rd Street. Is there any reference for either? -Eagleapex (talk) 22:58, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You missed where it said "It began as... at..." Then it goes on to say it moved to the location that now houses Wexler. Centerone (talk) 18:06, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Proposed for deletion
I think the Black Banana has notoriety, but only among a certain set of people. I agree the article lacks strong sources. I'm likely to get access to newspapers.com soon, I should be able to find some refs. Give me a week, but even if not much turns up, I'd prefer an AfD. It's possible that would shake out some sources as well. Thanks. - Mnnlaxer &#124; talk  &#124; stalk 06:28, 22 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Mnnlaxer asked me for help on my talk page, but I don't really have time at the moment. Anyways, just for ease of reference, here's a quote of my response from my talk page: That's going to be difficult considering how long ago it closed down. Do you have any access to either philly.com historical article archives, or other archives? I'm thinking Philadelphia's City Paper, Philadelphia Weekly, the Welcomat (I think it was what it was called before it became the philadelphia weekly..) would have articles or mentions. ALso scour these: basically searches of google books for black banana philadelphia, black banana philly, black banana club, etc. etc. I had included a bunch of properly formatted but shortened links here, but wikipedia won't et me because I used a url shortener because the links themselves were absurdly ridiculously long. Anyways when you do it a search it is helpful to use quotes around the phrase black banana. I don't really have much time to work on this article at the moment myself. I see A mention in Billboard magazine in 1981, and lots of other references that clearly are the black banana we're talking about, although I didn't bother to read any of the articles to see if the mentions are anything worth quoting or good references. Also, if you search books.google.com too with a similar search, you see a reference to a writing about when it was La Banana Noire. Also check the article history, it looks like a reference to that article was once a citation in the article, I'm not sure why it was deleted. Also, there used to be a virtual online black banana recreation, I thought it was linked here as an external link at least, not sure why it isn't anymore. Also, if you search Xavier's name you get some mentions including a 1979 article on the washington post's site.Centerone (talk) 05:17, 23 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh, BTW, I think the Philadelphia City Paper website was archived by archive.org / the wayback machine. I don't know if they had an archive of the city paper's print publications prior to the web online or archived. Centerone (talk) 05:19, 23 December 2017 (UTC)