An offshoot of this kind of tie-up, which has the further effect of keeping the compositions of the unknown or the unelect from the market, is off-the-record agreements between the principal publishing houses tied up with singers and band leaders to play only the product of the companies in the charmed circle. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
The demonstrating offices are besieged by ambitious youngsters, failures and never-could-be's who think that they can find a "Yes, We Have No Bananas" or "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" to draw them to the top overnight. These are inconsequential persons and they are insulted and refused, but they break through here and there.
For a bad singer, all songs are bad. Yet it is in the nature of the stage-struck never to admit that they have failed, but to carry the deathless conviction that it is the "material." They haunt the music publishers, fighting for a chance at the latest, always with high expectations that this time this will be it.
So the Brill Building, overrun as it was for years with every element of the prize ring and the sheet music world and its vocalists and hoofers and bandsmen, naturally became a beehive for minor agents, who pick up shabby fees from unimportant performers.
Some of these have offices in telephone booths and some of them only in their hats. For a commission they will try to sell anything to anybody. They watch the cheap saloons for a "disappointment"—which means that an act has fallen out temporarily or permanently because of delirium tremens, dismissal or death; they try to induce other saloons, without entertainers, to try some—find small, off-key dens and seek to sell them a singer or a sister act. The amount of aggressivenessand persistence they put into their misspent endeavors would probably get them a good income anywhere else—but they would be out of "show business," and they never will be.
Tin Pan Alley has its own glossary. All songs are "numbers." Love songs, mother songs, anything romantic, are "ballads"—a remote adaptation of the original word. All songs of regret and revenge and love's bitter grief are "torches." All crazy songs, which make no sense, are "freaks." All crazy songs which make some sense are "novelties." War songs are "flag wavers." All songs about the south are "Dixies."
The overnight possibilities of radio and millions of juke-box and parlor records have revolutionized the arts and wiles and guiles of "plugging," which is too bad in some ways, though the members of the craft were generally about as venal vultures as the morasses of Manhattan have disgorged.
Their vocation gave them license to knock on dressing-room doors, and many pressed their advantage beyond the call of duty.
They had expense accounts, some professional standing and a fund of that gutter shrewdness and knowledge which are perilous possessions of the unprincipled, yet licensed, scavengers who infest the outer rims of a world which holds forth a few miraculous rewards and an untold number of sordid soul-searings to young, impressionable, overoptimistic girls who reach so desperately for that one chance in a million.
Such girls are exposed to contacts in getting costumes, make-up, dancing shoes, printed "notices," their very jobs. They are hectic, striving, not subject to thereactions and restraints of sheltered, normal living.
And it is no attack on the geniuses and executives of the music business to state that the riffraff of its ragtag has a sustained record of abusing the hospitality of a harum-scarum world where shadow and substance have undefined borders.
Nearby, too, are the home offices of all the giant Hollywood studios. The pavements, which at night echo and re-echo to the tread of millions of heels, are pre-empted all day by cigar-smoking, side-of-mouth-talking, sure-thing artists and wise boys; bookies, promoters, pluggers, gamblers, hangers-on and layers-off.
The southeast corner of 50th Street and Seventh Avenue epitomizes the decline of the Stem. Gone is the glamorous Earl Carroll Theatre that once graced the spot.
Today, where the most beautiful girls in the world passed through the magic portals, there is a two-story taxpayer with a five-and-dime, a chain pharmacy and a chop suey emporium.
The career of Earl Carroll was as fantastic as any in show business. A Pittsburgh theatre usher turned flyer in the embryo air force of World War I, Earl first made his mark as a song writer, when Enrico Caruso bought special lyrics from him.
Even before he built the first of his two theatres, he was pressing Ziegfeld in the girl-show industry.
Yet the trade knows that none of Earl's proud productions ever showed a profit on the books, saveWhite Cargo, which wasn't a musical, and the rights to whichwere taken from him. Carroll, however, lived like a king, on salaries and royalties, though his backers committed suicide, went bankrupt, or both.
On Broadway they still talk of Joyce Hawley's champagne bath. Carroll threw a private party on his stage for friends and backers. Miss Hawley, teen-age chorine, was ordered to bathe in a tub of champagne. Some said she was nude.
Carroll was indicted—not because Joyce wore nothing, but because he denied he bought the wine. Earl was true to his bootlegger, claimed it was only ginger ale. So he did a bit in Atlanta for perjury, rather than blow the whistle.
Carroll's second theatre opened in 1931, with the eleventh edition of the "Vanities." It was the most magnificent legit house ever built, with luxuriously decorated rest rooms for the chorines and a backstage that could play a circus. Before the year was out, they took the house away from him. The $5,000,000 structure limped along as a cinema revival house and cabaret, only to be razed for a Woolworth.
Washed up with New York, Earl produced a supper-club floor show at Palm Island Casino, Miami, in 1935, and again in 1936, when the intrenched mobsters kicked him out. Carroll moved on to Hollywood.
Half the movie colony came in as stockholders on his first night club, the idea being that they would own special private boxes. But the financing came to a halt when the framework was up. The stockholders bowed out and Earl got control. His success in Hollywood became legendary; he lived like an Eastern potentatein a mansion that made a movie set look like a Quonset shanty.
Plenty happened on and off Broadway—to the Earl of Carroll!
The complexion changes at dinnertime, when the excursionists and suburbanites, disgorged by the train-loads from subway kiosks, take over.
The rush reaches its peak between 8 and 8:30, when the steady but slow-moving stream of stragglers, strollers and starers meets the head-on rush of theatre-bound hordes.
Again at 11, when the curtains fall in three dozen houses, there is a mad scramble of hemmed-in humanity.
Soon after midnight, though the lights still blink bravely, the crowd thins out and drops off. Broadway, having lost most of the places that attract revelers, is no longer a late street.
Its larger night clubs, patronized more by tourists and middle-class burghers, have little play after 2A.M.Only a few even bother to present late shows, though in other sections of the city floor entertainment runs until 4 o'clock.
When the gawkers get off the Stem—but long before the break of day—it is taken over by its third set of citizens.
Dope-peddlers work the west side of the street, between 45th and 47th Streets, and on Seventh Avenue, between 48th and 50th Streets, on the east side of the street.
You can buy reefers in a dozen cheap bars on 48th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and at 51st and Seventh, in front of the cafeteria. In fact, when Federal agents haven't their full quota of pinches in at the end of the month, they tap people at random here—and almost every one has the "makings."
Blowzy hookers congregate at 47th.
Runners for clip joints work outside the bigger bars and clubs. Policy pay-off men visit the saloons and cigar stands.
About this time, too, chorines and musicians are getting off. They swarm into the sandwich bars, delicatessens, lunch counters and all-night drugstore fountains.
The first faint streaks of dawn, breaking through the long, narrow lanes to light now almost deserted Broadway, point the way home to offside hotels and bed for make-up-streaked cuties who may dream of Hollywood, fame and fortune.
And this year, and next year, and every year, maybe five will find it.
The pages immediately preceding and following this chapter are devoted to those portions of the New York scene which, not physically on the street known as Broadway, are so intimately connected with it that in the idiom of the city they are referred to as "Broadway."
For instance, "Dream Street," the theatre section, and 52nd Street's Swing Lane are parts of the Broadway scene, though the latter is a good 300 yards removed from the Stem.
At this writing, the late Mayor LaGuardia's verboten on the old institution of burlesque still stands, but the average peasant will not be looking for it here, because his own home town probably tolerates at least one burly-Q house.
The nearest theatres dispensing that form of entertainment are in Union City, N.J., reached by Lincoln Tunnel, or 42nd Street ferry (10 minutes) and in Newark, reached by Hudson Tube (30 minutes) or Pennsylvania Railroad (15 minutes).
Though the so-called "Poor Man's Musical Comedy" is outlawed here, many of our $5 and $6 musicals and stage plays contain material that would make the most frenzied front-row burlesque patron blush. But there are still no "strippers."
One gal of our acquaintance who had made a respectable and comfortable living on the road (even in Boston) peeling in night clubs and theatres, was booked into one of our larger cafés last year.
Aware of the police ban on that form of art, she revised her act to a comedy strip-tease, which left her clothed almost as completely as an Eskimo maiden, at the crucial end of the bit.
But, next day, the management got one word from the cops—"Nix!" The monitors of modesty admitted the girl was completely clad. "But," said they, "it is a sub for a strip-tease."
There is nothing approaching the nudity permitted in other cities in our midtown clubs.
Navels must be covered.
As for higher up—
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. That's about all you can still shed on Broadway.
4. THE THEATAH!
Though films, radio, video and even night clubs far surpass the legit in numbers of those employed and in earnings of most stars, New York is the last citadel on this continent of that phantasmagoria of the ages, the theatre.
Shubert Alley, a narrow private street running from 44th to 45th, behind the Astor Hotel, is its ventricle. Within a 300-foot radius are some of the most important playhouses, the thrones of most of the theatrical impresarios and mighty agents, and the dining places and haunts of the distinctive, generic folk who compose this gregarious galaxy. Old-timers, and some stars, still foregather in the Astor Hunting Room. The mart and meeting place for lunch, dinner and after openings is Sardi's.
The youngsters eat at Walgreen's drugstore, 44th Street and Broadway, and the drugstore in the Astor; instead of cocktails they sip cokes and smoke reefers.
Here they swap dreams, inveigh against the "favoritism" that holds them back and tell what they'd do if they had the part instead of Helen Hayes.
Unfortunately, too many of the adolescents have been tinged with political radicalism and tainted with homosexuality.
Yet, the New York theatre is still the most vital and vibrant facet of show business, and from it comes almost everything good in its bastard offspring, radio,its newer brother, television, and the movies.
Despite the thousands of accounts that have been written about the drama, the comedy and the cruelty that go into an offering in a first-class playhouse, no one has yet conveyed realistically the hopes, the fears, the prayers, of the actors, the authors, the directors, producers and attachés as they approach and experience the momentous opening night.
It is a gigantic gamble, forever in untried walks; for the over-all combination is never the same.
One chuckle in the right spot can make a career and a million dollars; a dimple in a knee, an ad lib side remark which is left in because it was spontaneous, an expression on one face at a critical moment, have been known to do it. Yet, no one has ever lived who could say, before an audience has put thumbs up or down, "This is a hit."
There has been much controversy over the power of the critics. In New York, these dozen professional reviewers are a jury, voting the fate of many men and women, who are on the defensive. But there is no presumption of innocence, and there are no attorneys to plead for the accused.
There is the right of appeal, to the public; and, once in a miracle moon, the people override the reviewers.
Saddle-sore, jaded, blasé playgoers they are; honest, usually. Broadway-wise, they can recognize a success. Because they are regulars and show-weary, they are quickest to rise to anything above mediocrity.
Having been critics, we know the way the fellowsreact and feel. They are not vicious deliberately, as many have charged; nor are they soft and sympathetic, as many would have them. They have a job to do and their obligation is to the reader, not to the subjects of their criticism.
The first-nighter, whose mass response in a measure prompts and primes the critics, is likewise a recidivist, an addict, and therefore a tough customer. He and she make all the openings—to see, usually to sneer, sometimes to cheer, often to be sadistically delighted at the spectacle of a misspent endeavor.
They do not go, like others, because they are especially drawn by a star or a playwright or the glamor of a title, or—which is most important—because they have heard or read that this is worth seeing. Those who do so are in the mood to be pleased. Those who go to show off sables and necklaces, to see how others dress, to brush against the wise crowd and gossip in the intermissions, are, at the very best, neutral.
And they grow impatient and belligerent because too many around them are synthetically enthusiastic.
Those would be the husbands, wives, sweeties, neighbors, creditors and kin of everyone affected by the life-and-death trial. They laugh on hair-triggers, applaud bit-players' entrances, loudly approve.
They are no corporal's guard. In a city like this, there are a half-million people directly concerned in the destinies of the theatre.
The average company includes 20 performers, 13 stagehands, a unit manager, a press agent, from one to three authors, a director and assistant director, oftenan orchestra, as often a chorus of 12 to 40, not to mention the house employees. Hundreds have worked on costumes, painting and constructing scenery, the properties (movable tangibles), advertising, wigmaking, lighting, photographing and the many other processes that go into something that someone "presents."
None of these persons must miss a première. Seldom is a single ticket bought, so multiply automatically by two. Then add collateral and congenital kin and romantic close ones.
These favorably prejudiced rooters, plus the asbestos-lined, never-miss first-nighters, plus the critics, the hawk-eyed scalpers, the hard-boiled New York scouts for Hollywood, the agents of the players or acquisitive agents looking for clients, nervous stockholders in the theatre and show and their staffs, comprise the hundreds "out front" on the monumental night when everything is riding on an uncharted path toward a gold mine or a morass.
It is not a "representative" audience. But it represents New York and all the 48 States. For this is the night of decision!
There has been much talk and squawk for "constructive criticism." It would mean about nothing. By the time it appears, it would have to be reconstructive. And it's then too late.
A handful of plays have upset the original opinion, notablyAbie's Irish Rose,Tobacco RoadandHellzapoppin'. In all those instances, and the few others where a production caught its second wind, the backers were game and optimistic, plowed through losses with a confidence rare in such enterprises.
As a rule, what the first-nighters say as they come out is final, be it an Ibsen revival or a Theatre Guild musical or a bawdy revue.
Word spreads amazingly fast and far. Fifteen minutes after a smash has rung down, the cigar-store crowds in the Bronx and the burghers on Staten Island and the stoop-sitters in far Flatbush are chewing about it. For a big hit is big business in the Big Burg.
No recurrent event, including contest sports, sells papers like an important opening. Thousands know that what the critics say means a flop or a run. Not only are many directly interested, but millions follow such news, as Los Angeles reads Hollywood trade matter, Chicago goes for stockyards' statistics, Detroit watches auto output, Washington eats up politics and Memphis seeks the latest on "the state of the River."
For the stage is a colossal industry in Greater New York.
Its "legitimate" houses turn over more than $1,000,000 a week in good months.
Its unions are rich and powerful, its personnel exceeds in volume the population of some metropolitan cities.
Yet its fortunes hang on invisible, intangible hairs!
5. SWING LANE
In defianceof police regulations, two lines of sleek and fancy limousines are parked nightly outside Jack and Charlie's famed 21 Club in 52nd Street.
One reason why the cops close their eyes while pounding that beat is that the cars, with liveried chauffeurs, are owned by the rich and prominent townsfolk. Another is that many of the machines carry burnished seals, signifying they belong to, or at least are assigned to, high city, state and national officials.
West of Fifth Avenue, 52nd Street was long a street of wealth. Today, the 21 Club is wealth's last outpost.
This was a baronial thoroughfare, lined on both sides by fancy brownstone and brick residences of solid and superior citizens.
But the northward encroachment of business, culminating in the late 20's and early 30's with the construction of Rockefeller Center only a block south, drove the householders elsewhere.
Many of the luxurious brownstones were converted into rooming houses and made over into one- and two-room apartments; but the chief industry in the block was speakeasies. The street was a natural—it ran in the right direction, i.e., its one-way traffic was routed from west to east, which in midtown New York is important, because the bulk and the best of aftertheatre traffic goes that way.
Repeal brought new problems. Drinkers wantedmore room and more air. A dozen years of small, smoky dives caused claustrophobia.
In 1933, they welcomed the big, roomy, hotel grills and Broadway cafés.
Of the 50-odd blind pigs in 52nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth, only two remained. But those two have become national institutions.
By far the most famous cabaret night club in the country is Leon & Eddie's, at 33 West 52nd Street. It started in 1929 as a narrow, dingy speak, directly across the street from its present premises, at No. 18, now part of Rockefeller Center.
The 21 Club, next door to Leon & Eddie's, technically is a restaurant, not a night club, inasmuch as only food and liquor are served; no show or music.
A history of the 21 parallels the decline of society, about which more in a succeeding chapter.
Its proprietors, former speakeasy operators, came to be considered arbiters of high fashion. It was supposed to be a great honor to be permitted to enter their saloon. And if one of the bosses deigned to talk to you, it was regarded by many as equal to being a box-holder at the Metropolitan Opera.
When one of them (Jack Kriendler) got scorched in the papers, however, it was over a mess with a middle-aged Long Island matron, and the whole town howled with the anticlimax of it all. Kriendler died at the early age of 48. His funeral, attended by top names, was the social event of the season.
Though most of 52nd Street's gin joints folded anddied in 1933, the thoroughfare did not lose its essential character as an entertainment avenue.
People were used to it, the traffic advantages remained, and it was near to the Music Hall, Broadway and the East Side.
Many of the undercover locations blossomed out under new management, and with new decorations, as intimate night clubs.
Leon & Eddie's already had moved across the street and already was famous.
But in a little room, over near Sixth Avenue, called the Onyx, something happened that set the street for all time to come.
The Onyx was a musicians' hangout. It seated about 50, specialized in hot licks played by a small pick-up band, headed by two nimble lads named Farley and Riley.
They had written a gag song called "The Music Goes Round and Round." It was unpublished, but by request they played it eight or ten times a night at the Onyx, and many of the musicians who came in to relax joined in the jam sessions and played it with them.
The song was finally published and became one of the top freaks of all times. Its chief result, however, was to firmly establish 52nd Street as Swing Lane.
Through the years since then, dozens of clubs have come and gone on the street, with Leon & Eddie's and 21 the only prominent ones to remain through it all. Yet it's still known as Swing Lane.
During the past few years its complexion has beenchanging, as more and more smaller swing spots have begun to specialize in Negro entertainers and bands.
Many of these small clubs have become, for all practical purposes, "black and tan" spots where whites and Negroes (of opposite sexes) mix, not furtively.
Two other developments in the street—said to be natural consequences of its jazz madness—are the presence of reefer (marijuana) addicts and homosexuals, of all races.
Mind you, these people do not go to Leon & Eddie's or many other places in the block.
But the owners of the clubs they infest—mostly small places near Sixth Avenue—have been helpless before the horde and many of them welcomed this new business.
It is the observation of these writers that mad modern music, sex perversions and narcotic addiction run arm in arm. They surely do in night clubs.
Police and Federals have frequently raided these dumps and arrested dope-peddlers, including musicians, hat-check gals and waiters.
A few of the clubs had their licenses lifted for short periods, but in every instance, when the proprietor proved he didn't know about the lawbreakers, they were restored.
One corner of 52nd and Sixth Avenue is particularly obnoxious, a hangout for prostitutes and homos, dark and light.
But don't let this scare you from a trip to 52nd Street. It is part of the spice, and you are completely safe, especially at Leon & Eddie's.
Since V-J Day, many night clubs on the south side of 52nd Street have been torn down to make way for the Standard Oil Building extension of Rockefeller Center.
Many established cabarets were forced to shutter or move when the work first got under way, and present indications are that, before long, the seamier sides of Swing Lane will have disappeared, leaving only a handful of top respectable spots.
Meanwhile, a peculiar situation developed as a result of this infringement by big business. At the eastern end of this one block are stone skyscrapers and exclusive shops showing luxurious wares.
One square to the south is Radio City, and a block north is dignified, restricted 53d Street.
Those who own the real estate at the west end of Swing Lane have a feeling they are directly in the path of Manifest Destiny. Their property has possibilities of incalculable wealth. The golden lightning is scheduled to strike so soon, the freeholders do nothing toward improving the brownstones which still remain, but rent them out at high rates to night clubs on the ground floor while the upper stories cater to transient roomers or have been reconverted into small kitchenette apartments.
In this little valley less than a hundred yards long is a unique concentration of vice and hokum. Here are deadfalls designed especially to attract the tourists with promises of naughty displays of undraped female cuticle; yet, by the time the customer has paid his tab, he's seen nothing more revealing than a fat female supposed to be "nude," whose generously proportioned panties and bra (which always remain on) are constructed of material as thick as carpeting, and as opaque.
Yet other places, next door, cater to dope addicts, perverts and streetwalkers, while many of the furnished rooms over some of the most respectable places are frequently employed as assignation houses, or provide drop-ins for youths and young girls seeking places in which to engage in mad marijuana revels.
Fifty-Second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, has long been the poor sister of Swing Lane, for most of its length a dreary, dingy path of parking lots, garages, closed stables, and a few saloons, though right near Seventh Avenue there are a few first-class restaurants.
Another 52nd Street phenomenon is an influx of Chinese restaurants in the past few years. There are five in a half block off Broadway, and more than a dozen others within a block radius. But more about the uptown Orient in a later chapter.
6. EAST SIDE, BEST SIDE
The linesof the Kipling poem have been rewritten. Here we say—"Take me somewhere east of Fifth, where a man can rinse a thirst."
The past decade has seen most of midtown New York's night life—the publicized part, anyway—transferred there.
Here are the places where Gotham's cabaret-wise go; the big glitter and glamor joints on the West Side are for visitors only.
However, when the oaf searches for the so-called entertainment district on the East Side, he will not find it. All the patronage is taxi trade—or drop-ins—from the huge neighboring hotels and apartment buildings. There is no East Side Bright Belt.
The East Side is where you find such snooty places as the Stork Club, El Morocco and the Colony; such gay spots as the Copacabana and the Versailles.
Many of the world's finest and most celebrated dining spots snuggle in the section; there are so many, it would be impossible to give even a sketchy list here. One—Chambord—surrounded by tenements and low groggeries, where pheasant breast sells for $16, is regarded the costliest on earth.
Once the term "East Side" connoted poverty. It signified endless miles of filthy streets, lined with rickety tenements in which millions of Europe's dispossessed struggled for a foothold in the land of promise.
Of that East Side—the lower East Side—much remains.
Our present excursus deals only with a wonderland of wealth, a unique Mecca of marble and steel with all the world's riches, that lies above 42nd Street, a creation of recent times—a development in the wake of the electrification of the New York Central tracks, and the opening up of miles of priceless and convenient midtown property to exploitation for residences and office buildings.
This East Side cannot be described in one sentence, nor in one book. It is a Manhattan mélange of money and beauty, prodigality and banality, with haunts and hangouts of every description, from pizzerias for truck-drivers to regal retreats.
There is the world-famed Stork, owned by thesui generisSherman Billingsley, a smooth ex-speak proprietor and former partner of Owney "The Killer" Madden, prohibition vice king, which caters to internationally distinguished literary people, personages high in government, newspapermen, industrialists, stars, financiers, Fair Dealers, labor overlords and millionaire left-wing movie stars, writers, crooners and do-gooders.
There is also the far-famed El Morocco, owned by John Perona, another fabulous ex-speak proprietor, which serves much of the Hollywood and international society glamor set. Rules for admission into its zebra-striped confines are tougher than those for the Union League Club. No man wearing a sport jacket, or sport shirt, or sans tie, has ever been permitted to patronizeEl Morocco, regardless of his worldly rank or the size of gratuity pressed on Carino, the dour visaged maître d'. This Cerberus of the door is unimpressed by royalty, nobility, blue blood or Hollywood fame. He bars mobsters and those who look like them; tough guys and babes; noisy ones and pugnacious ones; those overdressed or overplastered. There are no exceptions. When Humphrey Bogart punched a dame who tried to walk off with his toy panda, in El Morocco, he was put on its louse list forever.
But there are clubs in the East Side that get most of their trade from perverts. Models, out-of-work chorines and loafers of both sexes play near by. A few still cater to what is left of the "mob," notably the Copacabana, where Frank Costello throws his lavish parties.
Park Avenue—beautiful, stately and broad boulevard built over the New York Central tracks—has taken up where Riverside Drive left off, as the place to hole up your "keptie."
Oh, yes, there are respectable people on Park—many of them. The per capita wealth of its residents is probably the highest in the world.
If you are an out-of-towner, and you have been slipped a phone number to call by a friend, for a charming companion to keep you company during your stay—at $20, $50 or $100 a night—you will note that the phone exchange isELdorado, volunteer orREgent, all East Side numbers.
When your guide points out a building as the scene of a particularly gory sex crime, you will invariablyfind it is on the East Side, probably near the East River.
For Gotham's Tenderloin has moved and changed.
No longer are the rich, lush pickings and pick-ups around noisy, flamboyant Broadway clubs.
New York has grown up, it seeks its pet pastimes amid surroundings of class, taste and luxury, of which these is plenty in the East Side.
Its shops contain priceless furs and gems, the screwiest and most expensive clothes and hats, the rarest and most unobtainable antiques, furnishings and rugs.
Its well-groomed and deftly made-up and turned-out ladies of leisure come high.
There is more wealth, more splendor, more finery gathered here than in any place on the world in any period of history.
The Sybarites were wrong-side-of-the-trackers by comparison.
A curious phenomenon of the recent war resulted in the greatest collection of treasure in the history of the world being stored in squalid Second and Third Avenue tenement houses, in the upper 40's and 50's, on the East Side.
Soon after Hitler took over, displaced merchants began pouring into America with rare gems, antiques and works of art as their only medium of exchange.
The beginning of war brought a tidal wave of similar fine works to these shores, as British and Continental art dealers moved their stocks here, out of reach of bombers.
New York, already an overcrowded commercial city,had absolutely no room to accommodate the hundreds of merchants who sprang up to sell these priceless goods. In desperation, they were forced into ground-floor stores of creaky and ratty old buildings in the slum stretches of Second and Third.
But, because this is a strange city, with contrasts in each block, and few well-defined upper class and lower class residential sections, it so happened that right around the corner from these tenements, quite often in the same block, were the apartment homes of the wealthiest folk in the nation—those most interested in buying such wares.
At the time the fabulous goods poured into the country, American millionaires began collecting jewels, art and expensive furniture as a hedge against inflation, on the theory that they always have value and are easily portable.
If you are coming to New York to make a splurge, or learn what life is like, or impress someone on a business deal, you must headquarter on the East Side.
Most any of its hundred standard hotels will do. If you are staying a while, you may want an apartment.
Humorist Harry Hershfield used to explain to his friends that he was "on Broadway, but not of it."
Those were the days when it was considered a rap to say of one "he has gone Broadway."
When one went Broadway (or Hollywood) it wasn't nice at all. He developed a severe case of big-shotitis, spoke of money in tablecloth figures and referred to Lee Shubert as "Lee" and Louis B. Mayer as "Louis" (when they weren't around).
But now, with most of the things that were then so characteristic of Broadway asde tropas a pug dog, the people who used to go Broadway go Park Avenue.
It is the same sort of disease, but more aggravated, and when it hits the average guy it raises a higher fever.
You can spot a man who went Park Avenue by the fact that he refers to Alfred G. Vanderbilt as "Alf" and Barbara Hutton as "Babs." He mutters gibberish of "dilatory domiciles" and "married maidens," and has a Social Register.
It has destroyed the usefulness of many otherwise useful people, as will be attested by several East Side night club proprietors.
But one of the queer results of the evolution in fashion is that a lot of society girls from Park Avenue have reverted—and "gone Broadway," becoming models, torch singers and even chorus girls.
The Park Avenue bug usually bites hoi polloi in one of the four or five East Side bistros that cater to the high-tipper set—Stork Club, Colony, Armando's, or El Morocco.
An attaché—say a press agent, headwaiter or even the boss—is swept off his feet by patronage of aristocracy; when the debutantes call him by his first name, the ex-barkeep begins to think of marrying one.
Unless a name is in the Register, he gives it a table in left field. He becomes the complete snob, an insufferable boor, and ends up being a chump to the congenital bluebloods and those who knew him when.
Now, some East Side night spot impresarios are hot to hire D.A.R. names, for tone, réclame and "contacts."
Sherman Billingsley of the Stork once thought it good business to engage a group of society girls to publicize his place.
"Maybe the debs can't do the job as well as the regulars, but they don't go ga-ga when they see a DePuyster," he said. "Besides, even if they don't get printed publicity, their friends come to visit them, which brings in business, which is what I'm in business for."
Not all who "go Park Avenue" are fakes or phonies. For the wealth, the fame and the acclaim that go as rewards for talent, endeavor or outstanding beauty also are on the East Side.
Those who achieve—via business, the arts, or charm—soon find the orbit of life has swung away from Grand Street or 42nd Street, as it had from Sioux City, and now extends from El Morocco to the Stork.
Take the tale of Florence Pritchett, outstanding beauty of two coasts, once reported engaged to young Alfred G. Vanderbilt, before his surprise marriage. Then she went with movie star Bob Walker.
Florence is the product of a small Jersey farm. Back home, like most daughters of plowboys, she dreamed of Broadway, read movie and theatrical magazines, studied the fashions in the slick paper issues.
But she didn't know how to dress or make up.
She came to New York, like many others, in search of big things. But Chance quite often puts gals like her behind a five-and-dime store counter instead of inside a natural mink.
Chance, in the person of John Robert Powers, the models' agent, discovered her. He whipped her into oneof the most fashionable young women in town. She quickly became his top number.
She married young Dick Canning, who before the war was associated with an advertising agency which handled the account of the New York Fashion Industry. Dick cleverly arranged a tie-up whereby his lovely wife was provided with the most expensive in the smartest of frocks, coats and hats, which she wore nightly to all the swank clubs. Every day she had a complete, different outfit. Imagine that, girls!—wearing $300 dresses, a new one every day, new $30 shoes, new ermines, new silver foxes, priceless hats.
Florence became the talk of the town. She was welcomed in the most exalted circles. Powers put her in charge of his school, teaching other young girls from farms how to become models. Then Dick Canning went away to war. Florence still had to go out dancing, at the Stork and other gay spots.
After her divorce from Canning, the wealthiest and most eligible young men in New York's swank set began to kneel at Florence's feet.
Florence capitalized on her glamor first as a contact woman for Sam Goldwyn, sent ahead of his super productions to woo publicity, then as a fashion editor, and later as a highly paid radio commentator.
She lost Alf Vanderbilt, but married another Vanderbilt heir, the very rich, very social Earl E.T. Smith.
Though clothes made the gal in Florence's case, Café Society doesn't go in for overdressing. The siren with the extreme hat or costume shrieks like one.
You will find that most best-dressed wrens, aristocrats or successful upstarts, seldom wear hats. While it's socially proper to dress formally, the percentage of those in evening wear in the best spots is definitely below the "fast sets" in rich inland towns.
But what East Siders lack in flash is offset in taste, quality and richness.
A mink coat is the irreducible minimum for a squab who wants to travel in our so-called best circles.
In some spots, ordinary minks have grown so common, it's said the women give them to their maids and take on gray and blue minks. In one club, the gag is that you aren't allowed past the plush rope unless you're wearing a stone marten or platina. Other animals are sent around to the back door.
The East Side's most overdressed crowd was seen at the fabulously successful Monte Carlo, a large portion of whose well-heeled customers were nouveaux riches from New York's golden needle trades market.
This club was born as the House of Morgan, built for the late Helen Morgan by a wealthy admirer. Torchy La Morgan was by then on the way down. The place soon folded and went into bankruptcy. Its premises remained empty until Felix "Fefe" Ferry, Romanian-born producer and promoter, an émigré from Monte Carlo, London and Paris, raised a bank roll to open what was to be the town's most exclusive cabaret.
The new company was underwritten by a score of New York's richest men, on the theory that, as part owners, they would become regular patrons.
A requirement for admission to the bistro was evening clothes.
Now, it is a fact that those who like to dress will not do so under compulsion. Even the stockholders stayed away.
When it went broke, Ferry raised new capital and operated under a less rigorous policy. But the seed had been sown and had taken root.
The real estate firm operating the property decided to take a flyer in the saloon business itself, putting Sam Salvin, son of a successful night club operator of a generation ago, and Dick Flanagan, a happy character with a load of friends, in charge.
The policy was quickly changed. Instead of pitching for the trade of debutantes and scions, notoriously poor spenders, Monte Carlo publicized its herring and wooed the rich dress manufacturers and their ladies. When this fizzled out, another switch was tried—quiet refinement.
Once one of the five top money-making cabarets of the world, it is now shuttered. Its patrons now visit Monte Proser's La Vie En Rose.
William Zeckendorf, president of the firm which owned the defunct Monte Carlo, swung the deal to bring the United Nations to New York over cocktails at one of its corner tables.
Another East Side restaurant patronized by those who know is El Boraccho (The Drunkard), strictly a dining and wining place, fronted and partly owned by Nicky Quattrociocchi, one of New York's odd characters. The money to open the place was put up byGracie Fields, the English screen star, and Monte Banks, her husband.
Nicky, a handsome immigrant who barged in 25 years ago from Italy, is a living example of how you can get by in Gotham on wits, nerve and connections.
After a short and desultory career in Hollywood as Theda Bara's leading man in silents, Nicky gravitated to New York, where he was classified a playboy.
He was always neatly dressed, traveled in the correct circles and knew the right people. Yet things were such that once he gave a "Bundles for Nicky" party, to which guests were invited on stationery headed by a list of 1,000 honorary chairmen, and asked to contribute items to help furnish Nicky's 12-room apartment.
Among the suggestions of what Nicky needed were an electric razor, baby grand piano, love seat and cuspidor. The party was a huge success and the apartment couldn't hold all the gifts. One reason was that Nicky's 12 rooms turned out to be a one-room unfurnished flat.
Nicky achieved another kind of renown—more gruesome. He was completely innocent, but a macabre coincidence attended another of his pranks.
Lovely, exotic Helen Kim Mont committed suicide in her Park Avenue apartment. Mrs. Mont had been on the stage under her maiden name, Helen Kim. She was of Korean descent.
As the poisonous fumes were snuffing out the life of this Broadway orchid—bride of 29 days—the lobby of her apartment building was filling up with several hundred gay society folk who had received Nicky's invitations:
"You are most cordially invited to attend a mystery cocktail party which will be given in honor of someone you know, by someone you know. Such a party, with your kind cooperation, should be the most unusual and amusing in New York."
Nicky had sent out the letters, inviting notables to the nonexistent cocktail party, scheduled to start at the hour the beautiful girl chose to end her life in another part of the building.
Stunned by the tragedy, which gave his jest a Grand Guignol denouement, Nicky said:
"I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite them to cool their heels for a while, and then show up. I had no way, of course, of knowing what would happen."
The deadly fumes had just killed Helen when the ermine-wrapped women and their top-hatted escorts began to flock into the building—and the gas emergency crew raced through the lobby.
Nicky started his East Side Restaurant on an investment of less than $5,000. Friends helped him construct the bar. Decorations consisted of labels from whiskey bottles, losing $100 horse race tickets and the lip imprints of women patrons.
The friends he made during his playboy days flocked to the new café, making it an overnight wow. And it never slowed up.
Despite New York's fame for entertainment, but a handful of cabarets catering to New Yorkers present shows, which are considered attractive to only the prairie flowers.
The average East Side café-goer usually doesn't evenwant to dance, and when he does he dances only sambas and rumbas, all other steps being passé.
The purpose of dance music in fine clubs is to provide overtones for conversation. For that reason, the bands play pianissimo and all melodies are in one tempo, so you aren't conscious of the breaks.
That's because New Yorkers don't go to clubs for laughs, legs or lilts—they stroll in to dine, drink and talk, to tell their patriots how pretty they are, or even sell a bill to a customer.
When New Yorkers want shows, they go to theatres.
Though we haven't the exact figures at hand, it's a pretty good bet that, per capita, there are more places to purchase liquor around newspaper offices than are to be found in the neighborhood of any other kind of business building.
During the late great drought, the side streets in the East 40's, near Second and Third Avenues, in the vicinity of New York's two largest journals,NewsandMirror, blossomed with speakeasies, so many in fact that one three-story building contained four.
After repeal, a good many of these resorts continued in business as legal saloons, catering mostly to printers, proofreaders and reporters, selling food and drink at moderate prices. Who ever heard of a newspaperman with a spare buck?
Came the war's beef and butter shortage. Ex-speak proprietors with bootleg blood in their veins again heard the stirring call to battle.
Word soon got around that you could always get steaks in these places. Furthermore, there was something bohemian in going to them, because you could rub shoulders with newspapermen and maybe once in awhile see a famed columnist or cartoonist.
Then there were the caricatures on the walls, often drawn by needy members of the craft in payment of booze, and the sawdust on the floor.
New York is a town that follows the leader. Locals began taking their out-of-town friends. Pretty soon you needed reservations and still stood in line, and dingy old saloons boasted doormen, while the journalists who had made the places couldn't wedge in.
The places caught on, and even after the shortages eased the once lowly gin mills continued to draw the carriage trade, considered by everyone in "the know" as the last word in "steakeasies."
Among them are the Palm, Second Avenue and 45th Street, known to initiates as Ganzi's; the Montreal, 45th and Second, known as Colombo's; Pietro's, at 45th and Third, once called The Key Club, because during Prohibition you used your own private key instead of a card; the Pen and Pencil and the Scribes in 45th between Second and Third; and Danny's, the Press Box, and Chris Cella's, between Third and Lexington.
A recent development on the East Side is the looming prominence of Lexington Avenue as a "Main Street." Lexington's rise can be traced in an inverse ratio to Broadway's decline, as the better class of visitor began to select East Side hotels and do his dining and dancing nearby.
Before the war—say a dozen years ago—Broadwaydrew a different type of tourist. Then he was a buyer, with fire in his eyes, desire in his blood, and all tabs paid for by the manufacturers and salesmen who were out to give him a better time than did their competitors.
Other visitors were well-heeled Rotarians from the interior and their ladies, here to see the sights and shows and do some shopping.
These people of ample means were Broadway's leaven, keeping it gay and prosperous.
Both large groups dried up during the war. Their places were taken by millions of gaping and gawking servicemen from everywhere, here on leave or passing through, and other millions of defense-plant workers from nearby Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut communities, their pockets bulging with unaccustomed wealth, for the spending of which they had no talent.
It takes many years of practice and some taste and intelligence to make a buck do the things New York can make it do.
These barbarians inundated Broadway. They drove the last remaining residents off the White Way, and with them went much of the flavor of the Stem.
To cater to this horde, which preferred to ankle aimlessly up and down Broadway, eat at hot dog stands and see a movie as the high point of the evening, came shooting galleries, flea circuses, "playlands," photo galleries, souvenir stores with pennants and fancy pillows embroidered with mushy sentiments, grind movies, "sex" bookstores, ham-and-eggeries, portrait artists whopaint your picture while you wait, and stands that sell "cocoanut champagne" at a dime the drink.
When the war ended, the "cheap-John" gravy train was over, too. But the better class of visitors never returned to Broadway, which is now forced to get along on a mere dribble of pikers.
The desirables, who began to come back to New York in great numbers, made their headquarters east of Fifth. Lexington Avenue, though one of the narrowest, soon became the East Side's main drag, for many reasons. First, it has more hotels than any other, many of them new, modern and varied in prices. The subway runs under it. Furthermore, both Madison and Park are restricted as to types of window displays and advertising, and electric signs are, as on Fifth Avenue, prohibited.
Third Avenue is still encumbered by the elevated railroad, the only one not torn down to make way for progress, and Second and First Avenues are not only too far east, but are dingy and slummy.
So Lexington is beginning to take on the attributes of a Main Street. It has all-night restaurants and lunch stands, all-night drugstores, and most of the better night clubs are no more than two blocks away, east or west.
Meanwhile, more and more chorus gals and show people, dispossessed by soldiers, sailors and bus-hoppers who have taken over the traditional theatrical hotels near Broadway, are moving to moderate-priced hotels on Lexington, and the Belmont Plaza lobby and drugstore are camping grounds where you can find thatblonde, second from the left—the best pick-up spot in New York.
In this eastward move to Lexington is a less glamorous aspect, as the streetwalkers followed in the wake of lonely men. You can see them, afternoon or evening, on the east side of Lexington, from 42nd Street to 57th—swinging big purses and whatever else they have to swing.
Whereas the $5 sisters in sin have inherited Broadway, these are $10-and-upwards snobs.
Another malodorous phase, which now seems the complementary concomitant of a big-town highway, is the horde of homosexuals who adopted it as their midway.
They parade with mincing steps in pairs and trios up both sides of the avenue. Some are blondined, some act "masculine," Negroes mix with white ones, all on the make for strangers.
Gotham's hard-boiled and efficient, but sadly under-manned, police force does its best to keep these misconceived creatures off the streets and out of bars, but there are so many drinking places on the avenue—in some cases ten to a block—it is impossible to make more than token arrests, of the most flagrant cases.
The fame of Third Avenue, a block to the east, is so frequently sung these days in fiction and the movies, that it is not necessary to tell you much about it, except that the so-called sophisticated set has taken over its dingy, old-fashioned saloons under the "El" with the homey Irish names, and driven their former patrons, calloused sons of the pick and hod, far away and muttering.
Here it is considered ultrasmart to drink at a bar where a self-respecting dock-walloper can't afford the new prices.
Here, drinking shoulder to shoulder, are jaded sons and daughters of the rich, bohemians, musical comedy favorites, artists and newspapermen, fairies and Lesbians. There's no room for a plain, honest Irishman.
Things are moving fast on the East Side. Between the time when this tome was started and its last words were written, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., "benefacted" the United Nations into abandoning the original dream of a bucolic world capital to be at home in a series of skyscrapers being designed for the East River front, between 42nd and 48th Streets.
Both authors of this book live within a block of the development. As they work on this paragraph they can see architectural monstrosities being erected on the former site of slaughterhouses, junk-lots and tenements.
Meanwhile, most of its permanent secretariat has taken up living quarters near the world capital-to-be, adding much "atmosphere."
This is a world within a world, with Arabs, Chinese, Haitians, Liberians, Hindus, Siamese—in native dress—mixing in hotel lobbies, restaurants, shops and on the streets, with French, Latin-Americans, Scandinavians, British—and the everyday motley of any New York thoroughfare.
7. WE NEVER GO THERE ANY MORE
No, wedon't. The Bowery, once the storied sinner's paradise, is dead and will not come back. Its glories belong to the past, when New York was young, and, grandpa said, gay.
The wide street under the Third Avenue "El" (soon to be torn down) has been turned over to lofts and salesrooms.
Sandwiched between them are hockshops and the flophouses where homeless hobos rent a clean bed for two bits; and cheap restaurants offer full meals, even in these inflationary days, for the same sum; and filthy bars sell bottled "smoke" at a dime (and an ulcer) a drink.
The only memory of a lurid career of wine, women, song, all-night hubbub and singing waiters (including Irving Berlin) is a lone cabaret: Sammy's Bowery Follies, purposely dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, with lusty, noisy, nostalgic entertainment of the '80's.
In the old days, however, the lines of the song—"The Bowery, the Bowery, they do such things...." meant just what they said.
Whereas at one time this zigzag lane had been the center of middle-class night life, with such music halls as Tony Pastor's, and beer gardens, concert saloons and fairly respectable dance halls where the modest toiler and his girl could spend an evening at moderate cost,in its later days the Bowery became the focal point for the worst dives in the city.
Here were low, mean resorts, beside which the dumps of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, New Orleans' Basin Street, and Chicago's 22nd Street were old ladies' homes.
Prostitutes, thieves, dope fiends, and underworlders of every kind made it their headquarters. Murder, suicide, rape, robbery were so common they were ignored by the daily papers, most of which were published a few hundred yards away, on the southerly extension of the Bowery, known as Park Row.
The Bowery gave up the ghost during World War I. Today, even the bums and hobos who are the last of its denizens are getting fewer and fewer, as reflected by the fact that many of the pawnshops are moving or going under.
But when some refined reformers recently started a movement to change the name of the Bowery, so it could shed some of the shadows of its ancient associations, the town rose in indignation against it.
The remaining remnant of the derelicts will not be disturbed. The city coddles them. A Bowery bum is treated with consideration rated by no other bum. The cops carry him from the curb where he has collapsed and lay him tenderly in a dirty hallway; the magistrates are lenient if a pinch is mandatory; the newspapers feature turkey dinners to the old-timers on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Since even "smoke" has risen in price, the 'bos now buy a pint of domestic wine, 12 per cent alcohol, andmix it with a pint of grain alcohol, and the result is Olympian.
The rubberneck buses are running again, and the spielers sing the sagas of the old cowpath. But they sound hollow. The bum has gone the way of the bison, a vanishing American.
Dark and dead, like the old Bowery, is Satan's Circus, more generally known as "The Tenderloin."
In less trammeled times, it epitomized wicked all-night life and commercial carnalities too strong even for some gizzards of the period.
Broadway, which then as now, was the show window, bisected it diagonally, but Sixth Avenue was its actual main street.
That long, wide slit (now called The Avenue of the Americas), scheduled by its property owners to be the future rialto, was lined with brothels and saloons from 14th Street to 40th. The lustier aspects of the old Bowery had moved to Sixth Avenue and its environs, and here were hatched the major crimes of the era. The infamous Haymarket dance hall and flesh-market stood at 30th Street.
This section, containing the worst dives in the city and the best theatres, dining places and hotels, was lush picking.
According to the historians it got its name when Police Captain Alexander Williams was put in command of the precinct.
"I been transferred," he is reported to have said. "Inever had nothin' but chuck steak. Now I'm gonna get some tenderloin."
The irresistible upward movement that characterizes New York carried the old Tenderloin above 42nd Street, and for many years there was more gambling, vice and felony in the streets between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, in the 40's and 50's, than in any comparable area in the world.
This came to an end—suddenly—after 1912, following the notorious Becker-Rosenthal case, when Police Lieutenant Charles Becker was executed in Sing Sing for complicity in the murder of Herman Rosenthal, a big-time gambler who squealed to District Attorney Whitman about the tie-up between police and the crime syndicate.
Madison Square Garden, where you see the fights, circus and hockey games, is nowhere near Madison Square and is not a garden.
Madison Square is at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. The present-day Garden is at 50th and Eighth. A new and larger one is to be built at Columbus Circle.
Long before the huge brick and concrete building you now see was conceived by Tex Rickard, there was the original, memorable Madison Square Garden at 26th Street, on the northeast corner of Madison Square. Its huge arena, like its current relative, housed championship fights, political conventions and auto shows.
Its chief claim to inclusion in any history of New York lies in the fact that its roof garden contained asupper club which, to the New Yorkers of the first decade of the 20th century, was a combination of the Stork and El Morocco of today.
Stanford White, leading artist and architect, had designed it. His glass-ceilinged apartments were in the building's tower.
One night, 40 years ago, while the popping of champagne corks blended with the soft music of an expensive band, Stanford White was shot to death in the restaurant.
His killer was Harry Thaw, heir of an immensely wealthy Pittsburgh family. Thaw, married to Evelyn Nesbit, most beautiful of the Florodora fillies and immortalized as the Gibson Girl, alleged that White had seduced his bride before their marriage.
The court battles which followed were classics, and the story of them is still considered by newspapermen as the top reporter's assignment of all time.
Evelyn opens and closes, still, at forlorn little cafés. There are yet traces of her loveliness—only traces.
Thaw died recently. Before his death he lived on a farm in Virginia and came occasionally to the city he thrilled, shocked and scandalized. His hair was snow white. His face was brown as a nut.
8. WHERE MEN WEAR LACE LINGERIE
Not allwho call their flats in Greenwich Village "studios" are queer. Not all New York's queer (or, as they say it, "gay") people live in Greenwich Village.
But most of those who advertise their oddities, the long-haired men, the short-haired women, those not sure exactly what they are, gravitate to the Village.
There are really two Greenwich Villages—the one the sightseer glimpses and the less appetizing one inhabited by psychopaths dimly conscious of reality, whose hopes, dreams and expressions are as tortuous as the crazy curves in the old streets.
"Artistic" sections are a magnet in all cities for tourists and for those who would livela vie bohème.
Greenwich Village got an extra shove during Prohibition. The factors which put Harlem on the night-life map also worked out for the Village. It was off the beaten track. Its streets were dark and narrow. Its buildings were old and dingy. A perfect set-up for speakeasies.
The village had once been a ritzy residential section. The Rhinelanders and Wanamakers lived at Washington Square. The Brevoort Hotel was one of the world's most noted. Edward VII, while Prince of Wales, was entertained there in the last century.
Mark Twain lived in a red brick house at Ninth Street.
The city moved northward. Instead of succumbing to the tidal wave of business, the Village became a backwash.
Skyscrapers stayed away. Stables and tumbling shacks remained. But into them came new residents. The district soon became the culture center of New York, and until quite recently, many famed artists, composers, literary lights and show people continued to live there. A few still do.
But a bohemian section always attracts the freaky fringe; those who would live the life of genius without having its admirable attributes, but all its faults and sins.
These, in turn, displaced most of the true intellectuals. In recent years there has been a return to the Village, as modern apartment houses have been run up, especially in lower Fifth Avenue and around Washington Square.
The Village's new "better class" has no more accent on art than on business and politics.
Greenwich Village night life mainly centers around three districts: Sheridan Square, where Fourth Street crosses Seventh Avenue; Eighth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and Third Street from Sixth Avenue to West Broadway.
Little bistros and boites, and even a few nationally famed clubs nest at sporadic intervals in almost every byway of the Village.
The best-known resorts of Greenwich Village are no more bohemian than any of the better uptown spots. Jimmy Kelly's, a beaut of a room specializing in fanwielders and dancing gals, is patronized chiefly by merchants and Wall Streeters.
The Village Barn, dubbed the Kathedral of Korn, features entertainment like Omaha and is the favorite haunt of jays from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Weehawken. El Chico is a rumba hangout.
On another plane completely are the joints patronized by the Village variants, where the customers are so mixed up the habitues don't know whether to use the boys' room or the other one.
There are floor shows in which most entertainers are fairies, men playing the female roles.
Many of these are in Third Street, though on Eighth Street, a few feet from the women's prison, is the city's most publicized "queer" joint—the Moroccan Village.
Most female homos' hangouts are in Third Street, and here, in a small, smoky and raucous saloon every Friday night is held a "Lesbian soiree," at which young girls, eager to become converts, meet the initiates.
These parties are presided over by an old and disgusting excuse for a woman, who is responsible for inducing thousands of innocent girls to lead unnatural lives.