Cocktail Glass

Waiters served cocktails in this plastic glass with a pin-up girl stem at Montreal’s famous jazz club, Rockhead’s Paradise.

In the 1920s, jazz musicians flocked from the United States to Montreal — one of the only North American cities not subject to alcohol prohibition — bringing with them a style of music developed in the early twentieth century by the Black community of New Orleans. Many Black immigrants settled in the Little Burgundy district, including Jamaican Rufus Rockhead, who arrived there in 1919.

For eight years he worked as a railway porter — one of the few jobs available to Black men at the time — and benefited, as did many others, from the journeys between Montreal and Chicago to smuggle liquor. He used his savings to make his dream come true, and in 1928 he opened Rockhead's Paradise, Montreal’s first bar owned by a Black man.