Nica

Nica Jazz Bar

Her name was Nica. She fell in love with Jazz and cats. Her name was the Baroness Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter.
Aristocratic, white, and fiercely devoted to jazz, she became both patron and protector of the men who played it—at a time when the music, and those who made it, were far from socially acceptable.

In 1956, newly divorced, Nica moved into the Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue, where her suite became a refuge for struggling jazz musicians. The place was soon nicknamed The Cathouse—for the cool cats of jazz who crashed there, and the 120 actual cats that roamed the rooms.

Despite the disapproving glares and whispered judgments of so-called polite society, Nica offered these artists what they often lacked: friendship, shelter, food, and pocket money. She paid their medical bills, chauffeured them to gigs in her Rolls Royce—and later in the legendary Bebop Bentley, a convertible as stylish and unpredictable as the music itself.