About the Blue Angel Hotel NYC

The Blue Angel Hotel NYC is named after the cabaret night club that occupied this location from 1943 - 1964. An early racially integrated super club, the Blue Angel welcomed Eartha Kitt, Mildred Bailly, Harry Bellefonte, and Bobby Short among others. Other stars to play the club included Johnny Mathias, Carol Burnet, Physis Diller, Peter Paul & Mary, and a 19 year-old Barbara Streisand. Woody Allan made is debut as a comic at the Blue Angel.

In 1946 the Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron changed their name to the Blue Angels after seeing the New York nightclub The Blue Angel, also known as The Blue Angel Supper Club. The team was first introduced as the Blue Angels during an air show in July 1946.

As described by James Gavin in Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret :

For the truly chic, a night out in Manhattan might mean a visit to the Blue Angel, one of the intimate East Side cabarets that catered to the well-heeled sophisticate. Billboard sent their reviewer to catch show-stopping British impressionist Florence Desmond and monologist Eddie Mayehoff, who had been added to a bill that also included singer Mildred Bailey, pianists Rose Murphy and Stuart Ross, and the Herman Chittison trio.

This was the sort of place where you might run into Noel Coward, Cole Porter or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Some would say it was the ne plus ultra of supper clubs, although others might opt for the more relaxed atmosphere of Tony's where Mabel Mercer performed and the crowd was mostly theater folks. Other rivals included Le Ruban Bleu and Spivy's Roof.

Although it was named for the raunchy cabaret in the classic Marlene Dietrich movie, the atmosphere here was quite different. Stiff covers and minimums kept out the riffraff. The decor was calculated to make those who had nothing but money to recommend them feel ill at ease. It was so refined and cultivated that, according to the Billboard review, the genteel, reserved crowd, dressed in dark evening clothes and stuffed together elbow-to-elbow at tiny tables, did not dare to respond to the entertainers with unseemly exuberance. There was none of that vulgar hoopla one found in the West Side clubs that drew the subway crowd. The Blue Angel had a "velveety approach to entertainment," in the words of the Billboard review. It was the sort of place approved of by The New Yorker, the ultimate guide to sophistication for the ad men who passed through Grand Central and their stylish suburban wives. The magazine's nightclub listings deemed the performances that week "an extensive, agreeable and intelligent evening," an appropriately decorous encomium.