Ludwig Bemelmans’s Paris bistro, La Colombe, combined two of his passions: art and innkeeping.“It was precisely what I had been looking for—a lovely house, half palace, half ruin, an old house covered partly with vine,” Ludwig Bemelmans wrote i…

“Sorry, wasn’t there a cabaret here?” a British woman asked the waiter. He was laying a napkin on the table and put a glass of white wine on top of it. For a second, I thought the woman was talking to me. “Oh yes,” the waiter said, “t…

I never really got the Blues, though I have certainly gotten the blues. Maybe that’s why, until recently, I had never heard of Alberta Hunter and why her recordings and I are now inseparable. If Bessie Smith’s blues are a wail to the world, Alb…

Whenever she was asked about her start in the world, the legendary saloonkeeper Bricktop—born Ada Smith—replied: On the fourteenth day of August 1894, in the little town of Alderson, West-by-God-Virginia, the doctor said, “Another little spl…