Istanbul-based U.S. writers penned the name “Constan Town,” to the occupied, soon-to-be former Ottoman imperial center. The reference of “Constan Town” isolates the European-stylized district of Beyo?lu, captures the migratory elements to the city, including U.S. amateur musician sailors as well as touring black American jazz musicians. “Constan Town” provides a starting cue for mapping an early jazz geography onto the terrain of occupation. As the city had been a stopover for performers since the 19th century, various local and foreign entrepreneurial designs combined to establish a leisure industry in the predominantly non-Muslim district of Beyo?lu. By the post-Armistice period, more performers, refugees, relief workers, soldiers, and travellers arrived with a significant number funneling into Beyo?lu. The district’s neo-classical sensibility and polyglot score offset the Muslim topography and predominantly Turkish-speaking residents of Stamboul establishing a metaphorical and historical chasm between the districts spanning the Golden Horn. The early jazz geography of the city consisted of a variety of spaces—nightclubs, dance studios, multi-tiered hotels and restaurants, haberdasheries—any commercial or professional outlet that catered to a globally shared and expressed early jazz trend. Envisioning Beyo?lu through the lens of early jazz demarcates a complicated urban racial, sexual and spatial reordering at a time of occupation, and was part of scripting differences onto Beyo?lu’s social topography expressed through “bodily metaphors” of culture, geography, race, and ethnicity. (Ramsay Burt: 1998) The paper draws upon urban musical and spatial narratives emerging in the local illustrated and foreign press, and understands space as a charged site for competing and overlapping agendas—economic, political, cultural, ethical, and moral—that elucidates Edward Casey’s posit that “controlled geographies need not play a significant role in the experience and knowledge of places and regions.” (Edward Casey: 1997) In Occupied Istanbul, the unevenness of jazz culture—understandings of it, participation in, and access to it—made space for creative possibilities and expressions, reactions and responses that informed the material and symbolic borders of Beyo?lu.