The clamor and crush of the crowd, especially in New York, was a topic of great interest to many modernist writers and artists. In Ralph EllisonInnovative writer and author of the canonical Invisible Man Read more’s Invisible Man (1952), the narrator describes his arrival in Harlem in the early 1930s:

The train seemed to plunge downhill now, only to lunge to a stop that shot me out upon a platform feeling like something regurgitated from the belly of a frantic whale. … I swept along with the crowd, up the stairs into the hot street. … I had never seen so many black people against a background of brick buildings, neon signs, plate glass and roaring traffic. … They were everywhere. So many, and moving along with so much tension and noise that I wasn’t sure whether they were about to celebrate a holiday or join in a street fight.

The artist Reginald Marsh often depicted New York life, particularly scenes of leisure—at the beach, on city streets, at night clubs, and at the theater—marked by throngs of bodies so close to one another as to be intertwined. In Harlem, Tuesday Night at the Savoy (1932), Marsh depicts one of the experiences of being in a crowd in which southerners could partake upon arrival in New York: a night of dancing at a crowded, animated Harlem night club with a mixed-race clientele. The Savoy Ballroom, on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets, was, in the words of writer Barbara Englebrecht, “a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the ‘soul’ of a neighborhood.’”