Front matter (continued 2)

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 that blonde, 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, we don'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, and mix 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. "I never 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 a supper 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 all who 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 live la 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 fan wielders 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.

It is a law violation for entertainers to appear in "drag" (clothes of the opposite sex). By means of broad burlesque, the regulation is skirted. The swish in wig and dress is okay if the trousers hang down under the gown.

Technically, homos must not gather on licensed premises or be exploited in a floor show.

Until a decade ago, many midtown night clubs presented such shows and catered to the twisted trade. When the cops cracked down, the pouting queens and Lesbians took to Greenwich Village.

There they are not molested by police if they remain in the district and don't bother others, on the theory that you can't do away with them, and as long as they're with us, it's better to segregate them in one section, where an eye can be kept on them. But the most notorious Lesbian night club in New York is on Second Avenue, south of 14th Street, on the lower East Side—the 181 Club.

Here, too, the police are comparatively lax about enforcing the law against female entertainers or hostesses mingling with guests. One reason for this "tolerance" in the Village undoubtedly is due to the fact that there are so many small joints in its narrow streets, it would take a regiment for enforcement.

Another is that in many of the smaller dives it's difficult to tell who is an entertainer and who a customer. All manner of exhibitionists, frustrated hams and undiscovered artists gather in these places. In many, the floor show is almost always impromptu, with most of the entertainment provided free by the guests, especially the "gay" ones.

Between these two levels of honest if Middlesex entertainment are the atmospheric places gotten up to look very Left Bank, with eerie lighting and futuristic painting to impress the pabulum.

"Occasional" prostitutes work some of the bars, and bobby soxers flirt at Washington Square. But most of the pick-ups in Greenwich Village are those between fags and between skirted women-hunters.

Since the working artistic colony forsook the Village and turned it over to congenital abnormals, the rest of the town seldom, if ever, is invited to Village affairs. All the excitement downtown now is behind closed and locked doors.

Drugs and depravities are prevalent at some of these purple parties, which often turn into unspeakable saturnalias within draped walls, in musk-heavy air.

An uncommonly large percentage of the nation's runaway girls are found in the Village, living with men or women. Recently there has been some Negro penetration. There is no racial discrimination in parts of the section.

In one of the Village's most famed cabarets, Café Society Downtown, the younger boys and girls of both races mingle openly.

This financially successful club had an uptown branch in the swank East Side, where customers also "hopped across the (race) fence." It was shuttered after the president of the corporation owning both clubs turned out to be the wife of America's "No. 2 Communist"—Leon Josephson, convicted of contempt of Congress. The village club is still operated but by new owners—not Red.

But shrewd traders in nature's mishaps profit by the surreptitious reputation of this off-the-highway sector.

They have runners at the clubs and around the town, whispering to likely cash-and-carry strays—women included—of Sodom and Gomorrah on Manhattan, where, for a stiff price, they can behold forbidden fruit.

When a fish is hooked, a quick 'phone call assembles the male magdalens and the female monstrosities. When the visitor arrives, the revel is in swing, to seem spontaneous. What goes on then is pretty much the real thing. Guests are rarely invited to any indulgence—they are spectators.

Groppe (grape) is served. This is made of the crushed remains of the ingredients of brandy, cheap, insidious and atomic. Whiskey is supposed to be adjured, but this concoction is even stronger, though it doesn't seem so to the tongue and tonsils.

The apartment, often a duplex with couches below and a bed or two on the narrow balcony, is candle-lit. The floor is strewn with exotic rugs. The furniture is individual and often distingué.

Whips, handcuffs, leg-chains, wire brushes and other instruments of sadistic and masochistic physical and moral aberration enter into the play.

It's all routined, timed and stage-managed.

The "privileged" who are "let in" on these practices have paid in advance—lest they are overcome by revulsion and cannot stomach the full show. If they stay through, they are besieged for "luck money," as gratuities are known among these habitues and sons of habitues.

This is the Village—if you care for such.

9. IT'S NOT TRUE

a.—Chinatown

The visitor to New York will not find the answer to the musty gag: "Is it true what they say about Chinese girls?" in Chinatown. The local slant-eyed Sadies seldom mix with Caucasians; and most of them are so shy they wouldn't tell you, let alone let you explore the question.

Almost every other superstition and preconceived notion you've had about the Chinese and Chinatown is as counterfeit as chop suey.

Remember the old song about "Chinatown, my Chinatown, where the lights are low."

Well, they aren't. Chinatown is so brightly lighted, with gay and multi-hued neon signs, that its few blocks rival Broadway.

Gotham's Chinatown is the oldest in the world, outside the Orient, and looks it.

Long before there were human habitations where now is San Francisco, there were suave and placid Orientals in Gotham.

New York's Chinatown, well over a century old, was first settled by a small group of Asiatics, stranded on our shores when a Yankee showman who had brought them here to exhibit their native customs and handicraft, beat it with the boodle.

Venerable tenements, some of which are said to have been standing when the first Chinese family moved in, more than 100 years ago, line its three crooked, narrow streets.

Though New York houses several times as many Chinese as San Francisco, our Chinatown is considerably smaller and certainly not so lively. Our Orientals are spread throughout the five boroughs of the city in which they work and live, very much like other citizens of this cosmopolitan metropolis. But Chinatown is to them their capital, their county-seat, which most of them visit every Sunday to see friends and relatives, transact business, shop for favorite provisions and stop in at the tong, clan or family clubhouse.

Chinatown boasts many Oriental restaurants, some of world renown, yet it knows no night life. There are more chow mein palaces in the area of Broadway and 50th Street than in Chinatown, and the city's only night club with an all-Oriental floor show, the China Doll, is in West 51st Street.

Chinatown proper consists of three short streets in an irregular triangle: Mott, Pell and Doyer.

Mott Street is in the territory of the On Leong Tong. The Hip Sings, smaller tong, control the other two streets. There are no other tongs in New York, all competitors having been wiped out by the surviving two.

Until 15 years ago, Chinatown was the scene of many gory wars and at times it was dangerous to visit the section. The hatchetmen proved notoriously poor marksmen when they discarded their traditional weapons for automatics. When too many innocents got plugged, the authorities stepped in, and after a threat to deport the whole Chinese colony, a permanent peace was patched up. There have been no wars since, though there is considerable unrest as Communists try to take over the tongs.

The tongs, in their more pugnacious days, might have been compared to the white gangs and mobs that fought each other, with even more ferocious violence, for territorial control of rackets.

Now the tongs are business and social groups, boards of trade or chambers of commerce, as it were. But many members are in dope and gambling.

Today the Chinese are among the most peaceful inhabitants of this polyglot city. Few are arrested for serious crimes, other than narcotic smuggling, in which lawbreakers invariably are sailors from China who speak no English and who are employed by white American criminal syndicates.

New York's Chinese are remarkably well-to-do. The elders of some families are rich even according to American standards, with their money invested in real estate, restaurant and laundry chains.

Chinese on relief are unheard-of, mainly because of a centuries-old custom of family unemployment insurance, whereby those who have jobs help out less fortunate relatives.

Furthermore, Chinese pride and "face" forbid acceptance of gratuities from strangers or public authorities. How backward they are!

Because of respect for family and elders, juvenile delinquency is practically unknown among New York's Chinese.

The sons of Cathay continue to be "pacifistic" in their dealings with white men. If humanly possible, they avoid contact with the white man's system of courts and police. They settle all their own squabbles according to their own customs and Oriental laws. If both litigants are members of the same social or commercial organization, such as a tong or a family club, the elders arbitrate the argument.

But if they belong to rival organizations, the quarrel is taken to Shavey Lee, so-called "Mayor of Chinatown," or to the Chinese Benevolent Society. If either is unable to work out a satisfactory solution, the Consul General of the Republic of China, with offices in Radio City, is called on to act as a court of final appeal. His verdict is always accepted, though one or both litigants may be American-born, thus American citizens.

Strangely enough, under the provisions of New York State's model arbitration act, most of these decisions by the representative of a foreign government are accepted as law. (Another example of how the Chinese did it first.)

However, should these verdicts be unenforceable in American courts, all Chinese parties observe them religiously. They have to. Failure to do so amounts practically to a death sentence—at least exile. For if a Chinese went contrary to the rules, he would be ostracized from the community and unable to do business with any other member of the community.

If he owned a restaurant, he couldn't hire Chinese waiters, buy Chinese provisions or serve Chinese customers.

There is a movement afoot to tear Chinatown down and relocate its remaining inhabitants throughout the city. The buildings are fire hazards and health menaces. But the Chinese are fighting stubbornly to retain their communal district. They say it is the only Chinatown in America that looks authentically like China. Also, it smells like it.

The visitor who has been to San Francisco's Chinatown first will be struck by the almost complete absence from the streets of our section of Chinese females over the age of 14. New York's Chinatown, much older, is far more conservative than those in other cities, or even in China, where the world has moved.

Our Chinese women spend most of their time in the home (which is regrettable, because they are dainty and pretty) while their men are out in the world.

There is far less intercourse between Chinese and whites here, also for that reason. Chinese parents try to keep their daughters away from white men, though in San Francisco, because Chinatown is so intimately connected with the life of the city, it is a commonplace to see them out together.

Naturally, taboos are breaking down as high school and college girls demand the right to associate with their schoolmates, regardless of race.

The tallest and most beautiful girl in Chinatown is Louise Leung, a model and showgirl.

Chinese are inveterate gamblers for high stakes. Some of the biggest craps, poker, gin rummy, fan tan and mahjong games in New York are played in Chinatown. But only between Chinese.

The cops are tolerant if no whites cut in. Many shops are merely fronts for gambling in the rear. The store shelves are almost completely bare of merchandise and if you should have the temerity to wander in and try to buy one of the few items kept as dressing, you'd annoy the proprietor greatly. That is, if you could get him out front, away from his game.

Just to keep the record straight, occasional arrests are made, but after the players pay their dollar fines they go right back to their cards.

In so far as the white population of New York is concerned, there is absolutely no Chinese prostitution in Chinatown. Yet many flats in the narrow streets are maintained with girls smuggled from the Orient as picture brides, expressly for entertainment of the local Chinese males.

The authorities know all about it, but look the other way so long as none but Chinese patronize the houses.

The local male Chinese far outnumber the females, and such places are considered a necessity.

A new traffic has come to the region. "Come to" is what's new about it.

The cops and courtroom loungers have long called prostitutes "flesh-peddlers." This appellation was never quite true. Inmates of houses, when there were such things, "sat for company"—the men came to them. Women who pounded the flagstones were peddlers only to a degree, as they had to be surreptitious, attract with a smile or glance, then be "solicited" to some extent.

But now, in Chinatown, young Puerto Rican girls are sent to bring themselves and offer themselves, to display their merchandise on the spot and to haggle over the price.

They go from house to house, floor to floor, door to door. They knock. If a woman answers (there are few instances of that) they say, "Sorry, mistake." If a man opens the door, the caller asks, "Want nice girl here?"

Some of these peddlers are in their early 'teens, for Caribbean females blossom young.

They are sent forth by their lovers, by their husbands, some by their own parents, to garner the dough.

In Little Spain sex is cheap, selling it is precarious and competition is not only voluminous, but perilous, for the girls will fight with knives over a prospect.

So the Puerto Ricans went hunting for a market and found it among the Chinese, underwomaned thirty or forty to one, racially conspicuous, so they cannot go forth into the byways, let alone the highways, on the hunt.

The secret of the new system, self-delivered sex, wasn't long kept dark.

The downtown hoodlums began to lie in wait for the girls after they had made their rounds, to beat them up and take their money from them. So now the girls, after one Mission Mott Street, book themselves ahead, dating each flat for the next duty tour—and they have the Chinese buy postal money orders, made out to them, individually, against the next visit. These are not cashable except by the beneficiary without running into trouble with the Feds, and the toughest canaille shudder away from that.

So the flesh-peddlers' profits now get to Little Spain.

The hick who takes in Chinatown from a sightseeing bus is led first to the Rescue Society for Bowery bums, which, according to the guide, is located in what was once an opium den.

Then he is shown a joss house, in back of the Chinatown post office, and he is told about the maze of secret tunnels which are supposed to connect most of the buildings in the area, for use during tong wars, opium or Prohibition raids.

The modern generation of American-born Chinese never smelled, let alone smoked, opium, and few of the old-timers remain. Occasionally you can spot one, a bent, wizened, broken and prematurely old fellow who stands out like a barn alongside his non-indulging brethren, who have the Chinese gift of seldom showing their age.

Concubinage is permitted under Chinese law, and some of the older, wealthier Chinese own an extra wife or two, or even a slave-girl brought over from the old country. But these are things you can't prove, and anyway, it's done uptown by the white folk, but under a different name.

Even in these days of sulfas and vitamins, most Chinese still believe in herb therapy. Maybe they're not so wrong. Many important drugs in the modern pharmacopoeia were discovered in Cathay, centuries ago—ephedrine is but one.

Chinatown herb dealers also sell concoctions guaranteed as love potions, aphrodisiacs and virility nostrums. Perhaps there's something to their formulae. The population of China is 450,000,000.

New Yorkers eat more Chinese food per capita than any other occidentals; more Chinese food is sold here than that of any other foreign origin.

Favorite is chow mein, with chop suey a poor second. Neither of these glutinous creations is indigenous. Both are American inventions. The Chinese themselves, and those who know good food, never eat either mongrel dish. You are spotted as a neophyte if you order them.

The authentic Chinese menu contains hundreds of exotic items, made of everything from eels to birds'-nests. If you want to play safe and not show your ignorance call for mo gu gai pan, which is a distant cousin to chicken fricassee.

Though Chinese men drink considerable potent spirits, women of the race seldom, if ever, imbibe. They say it makes their faces red—and it does. Their men discourage them from drinking, but white wolves, aware of the effect of champagne on slant-eyed dolls, try to load them with it, often with encouraging results.

The Chinese call us "white devils," lo fan or fan guey, and their word for wolf is chai long. Their favorite drinks are mui kai low and ng ga pai. Don't try either unless you possess a strong stomach.

b.—Little Tokyo

Before the war, there were few Japanese in New York. Most of them were treaty merchants, technicians or students, who evaporated with Pearl Harbor.

But then came the influx of Japs from the West Coast states. As many as 10,000 are reported to have moved here after being released from relocation centers, while countless thousands more came East before the final deadline to vacate Pacific areas. There was no Jap-baiting here. Many have since gone home.

There had been no "Little Tokyo" here. Now there are at least three small ones in Manhattan, alone.

The most concentrated one is in 65th Street, near Broadway, in the heart of the Filipino colony. Another, but sporadic, Jap settlement runs from 18th to 23rd Streets, near Ninth Avenue. A third group lives on the upper West Side, from Columbia University southward into the 90's and 80's where there are several Japanese churches, Christian, Shinto and Buddhist, and northward into Washington Heights.

Since the war, the Japs have taken an even less active place in the community than do the Chinese. Few are merchants or storekeepers. They, however, mix more freely with whites. The girls, especially, are found working in American offices, hospitals, hotels and even in show business, where many of the "Chinese" acts really are Japanese.

There are three Nipponese restaurants in New York, specializing in such concoctions as suki yaki, the national dish, and saki, the national knockout. These operated unhindered all during the war and were patronized by Americans and Chinese as well as Japs.

Miyako's in 56th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, is internationally famous.

Among New York Japs there is considerably less resentment against the relocation than appears on the West Coast. Those resident here before the war and those who came shortly after Pearl Harbor escaped confinement in concentration camps completely, while those who were shut in for short periods missed the worst of the indignity.

In this tolerant city, even during the height of the war, they found sympathy and encouragement and employment. With few exceptions, white neighbors treated them hospitably. They were not made to feel like a special, inferior class.

Even the Chinese welcomed them and gave them employment.

For that reason, the young Nisei in New York is less apt to be a sucker for Communist propaganda than his more bitter cousin on the West Coast. There are, it is true, a few leftish Jap youth groups here, suspected of being under Red domination, but most of the local Nisei disavow the movement, and resent attempts of radicals to involve them in an all-out anti-white movement, together with other dark peoples.

As noted, Japanese maidens are considerably less shy than their Chinese sisters, and more frequently mix with white men. Many local connoisseurs of Oriental beauty prefer Japanese women to Chinese, for, though it is practically impossible to detect a physical difference between them, the Jap girls are said to be more feminine, fun-loving and lively. Some of the outstanding "Chinese" girls at the defunct China Doll café were Japanese—notably Ann Koga, Katherine Kim, Trudy Kim and Tobe Kai.

c.—Koreans

Your authors once read somewhere that Korean women are supposed to be the most beautiful in the world. The expert who so stated said, "Ask any sailor, if you don't believe me." Since then scores of service men have written us to say it ain't true.

The New York Korean colony is small. Though there is a Korean church near Columbia University, there are said to be no more than 100 permanent residents of that race in the city. The number is slightly swelled by a few students, most of whom reside at International House, and frequent visitors from Honolulu.

Many work in Chinese restaurants. Some of the prettiest "Chinese" girls in show business are Koreans. At least one, June Kim, was a Ziegfeld Follies girl. Lovely Florence Ahn is a noted singer.

d.—Corregidor

The Filipino colony extends from 63rd to 72nd Street, approaching on Broadway. There are few Filipino women in New York, and for that reason the district is known to abound in disorderly houses.

Though many of their own women are as dainty as Japanese dolls, which they greatly resemble, most Filipino men seem to prefer blondes, big billowy-bosomed, over-painted ones. Many in that category are supported on a group or communal arrangement, each by several Filipino boys.

Well, some white gents keep several babes!

It's a difference in customs. Economics probably is at the bottom of it.

And half a blonde is better than none.

10. AROUND THE WORLD IN NEW YORK

As befits the most cosmopolitan city on earth, you can dine, wine, dance, make love, gamble or raise hell or children in practically any language you choose in New York.

In the one block of West 49th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, you will find bistros serving these native foods: Singhalese, Chinese, Jewish, French, Spanish, Mexican, Italian.

But the blood from the pulsating heart of New York's 8,000,000 doesn't pump only into the main arteries.

There are some 1,500 licensed cabarets in the city and some 20,000 saloons. These are scattered over all five boroughs. In many localities, especially those inhabited by foreign racial groups, miniature Broadways have sprung up, reminiscent of main drags in foreign countries.

a.—Beer und Pretzels

Clustered around Third Avenue and 86th Street in the heart of Yorkville, is the German section. Here there are dozens of beer halls, with waiters in native costume and fat, funny Brünnhilde sopranos singing Viennese waltzes and Bavarian seidel-songs.

Before Hitler, Yorkville was a fad. Prohibition was only an English word, untranslatable. The "Hoboken steam beer" was potent, spiked with ether before your eyes by the waiter with an eye-dropper. One visitor asked, "Hey—where's the operation that goes with this?"

We used to call the people we saw there "gemütlich," which means homey, and talk about their quaint costumes and customs and placid way of life.

Later—when lists of Nazis were released—we saw many of these stolid heinies on record. Though outwardly all Yankee light and love, the district is still a hotbed of Nazi fanaticism, though you hear few talk about it, even after a dozen beers.

The younger generation, of course, is solidly American and resentful of the old folks' European ways.

Other but smaller German sections abound throughout the city, notably in the Bronx and in Queens. In the latter borough were some of the most rabid pro-Nazis in the country. Here some of the German spies who landed from a submarine during the war were sheltered.

Many Lutheran churches in the Bronx and Queens conduct all their religious services in the German tongue.

A smaller and older German colony survives on the Manhattan East Side, between 14th and 23rd Streets. These are no newcomers; some of their restaurants trace back to the days when liberty-loving Germans escaped from Prussian feudalism in 1848.

One of the most famous eating places in the world and one of the oldest in New York is Luchow's, at 14th Street and Irving Place. Here, in several spacious rooms, occupying a block, is a memory of gracious, graceful days now unfortunately gone forever.

Eating is an art at Luchow's, undisturbed by raucous talk or jive. Instead, there is the pleasing music of a three-piece stringed aggregation which plays waltzes and operas and drinking songs. Luchow's features 14 different kinds of beer on draught and was the first American restaurant to obtain genuine Rhine wine and Pilsener after the war.

Throughout the years its guests have been the New York great, leaders of art, literature, finance and politics. George Jean Nathan and Henry Mencken eat there once a week, a practice they began almost a half century ago with Huneker, the great critic.

The menu is heavy with rich German dishes; the decor is strictly Teutonic. But the present owner of Luchow's is a Swede from Washington.

b.—Borscht and Blintzes

Second Avenue, south from 14th Street, is the Main Stem of the Russian, Romanian and Jewish lower East Side. A score of night clubs are here, many of national repute, presenting floor shows comparing favorably with the biggest.

The eating places are patronized by connoisseurs from everywhere, who relish European dishes.

There are theatres in Second Avenue presenting drama, musicals, revues and vaudeville, in Yiddish, where world-famed artists appear.

Second Avenue is as brightly lighted with neons as Broadway, and its shops display wares as costly as those on Fifth Avenue.

The people who patronize this gay way are imbued with the traditions of the old lands. Here, there is little whiskey drinking; wines and beer are preferred, along with a leisurely dinner, and pinochle afterward.

Vice does not thrive here, because the young blades seek it elsewhere. They find their legitimate amusement uptown, too, leaving the lower East Side almost entirely to the old folks, who are too set in their ways to want or appreciate the hurried pleasures of the Americans.

As these lines are being typed, at the corner of Henry and Pike Streets, in the very core of what once was the most famous American ghetto, lies the collapsed remains of a five-story synagogue.

It just gave up, after a hundred years of service, and tumbled into rubble.

The amazingly significant feature of this incident is that, though it happened on a Saturday afternoon, nobody was injured. The building, though still actively functioning, was empty.

This, on the Jewish day of rest and worship, gives you an idea of how time has changed the ways of that section of Manhattan into which poured the millions fleeing the pogroms, the Cossacks and the other European elements of outrage which made New York the largest Jewish population center in the world.

From the numbered streets beginning with First, down to the old commercial district, and from the Bowery to the East River, about 600,000 Jews, nine-tenths of them European refugees, lived for generations in squalor, dirt and congestion. Most of them followed devoutly their orthodox faith and rituals. No razor ever touched a male face. Girls from the marriageable age onward never exposed their hair, but hid it under wigs. All activities ceased Friday at sundown, after which, until dark on Saturday, no Jew could carry anything in his pockets—money, watch, keys, even a handkerchief. No Jew could light a fire or a candle or a lamp. For heat and illumination, Gentiles were hired and paid to strike the matches.

On Sunday, when the rest of the town was still, the ghetto bristled with business, trade, the myriad sweat-shop operations—which were largely carried out in the rooms in which families slept, ate and lived—and the Jewish population was a community set apart, neither adopting the manners of others nor proselytizing them to assume theirs.

Fifty synagogues flourished, some of them handsome and imposing, though the Jews in the main were miserably poor. Intermarriage with other races was unheard of. The Jews had their own banks and stores and mechanics, who kept their calendar and who spoke their language, Yiddish, which has a universal base, though it wanders off into a dozen different dialects, mainly of European derivation.

Today, all that has changed so that there are scarcely a fifth of those of Hebrew descent in the area and virtually the only ones who practice any of the habits of their forefathers are a handful of refugees who managed to get here since Adolf Hitler began to persecute so-called "non-Aryans" under the drive of his mad megalomania.

For decades, as the Jews became more prosperous, they scattered to better homes in upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Flatbush, where they penetrated into every walk of American life and became active in commerce, politics, arts and letters, journalism and even pugilism. About one-third of the old territory into which they originally huddled for mutual comradeship and protection has been razed for modern ideal apartment developments. Another substantial segment has disappeared under the advance of commercial construction. And what is left is largely the habitat of big business, which includes some manufacturing but is devoted mostly to jobbing and retailing, some of it on a tremendous scale.

Jewelry and furs are sold in magnificent stores, especially on Grand Street. The merchandise is frequently advertised in the regular daily press and among the customers are the dowagers and debutantes from the smartest sectors of the city.

The remainder of those who still choose to live in this teeming, malodorous and entirely alien stockade without walls constitutes a unique contingent in New York and American life.

That this was once the center of aristocracy during the pre-Revolutionary British occupation is attested by the names of the streets which still appear on the corner signs: Pitt, Eldridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Stanton, Essex, Broome, Rivington, Delancey, Rutgers and Elizabeth. But one has been added—Houston Street—which is pronounced Howston, though named after Sam Houston, and the downtowners will never change it.

On the once mansioned Pitt Street and for eight square blocks is New York's gypsy colony—thieving, bootlegging tricksters who do no useful work, who are unbelievably soiled and live 15 and 16 in a room, a vacant store or a cellar. Conditions here are far worse than in Harlem because most of these are illiterates and by some strange ruling, their children are not sent to American schools.

They have picturesque ceremonies for weddings, births and funerals, though all of these are common and frequent enough. For important funerals the tribes gravitate here from all parts of the country. Rejoicing, lamentation and just plain drunken disturbances are of no concern to the police. The gypsies pay no taxes and do not even vote. But they seem to enjoy a feudal duchy almost as immune against authority as it is against soap.

Surrounding them are specialized little Jewish groups, mostly arrivals within the last dozen years, comprising Jews of Galician, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian origin. These are excellent, thrifty, industrious people who bridge the chasm of foreign tongue and customs by hard work, a stubborn pride in their old-country ways and staunch worship of their God and the teachings of their church.

They occupy the only islands in this historical portion of New York with local rabbis whom they maintain from their meagre earnings, mostly at new trades which they had to acquire in this mechanized civilization after they had fled from the primitive villages and fenced-in cattle-corrals of the larger European centers.

Unlike many of the Americanized, American-born young GI's who cheerfully joined the 52-20 contingent, these oldsters do not go on relief. They appreciate the blessings of freedom and sincerely try to pay for them by good and upright citizenship even before they can become citizens.

All around them they see grocery, delicatessen and butcher stores run by their co-religionists, with ham and bacon in the windows.

They mutter in their beards over the moral decadence of the youth. They are teased and taunted by the young Jews as cruelly as, generations ago, all Jews were mistreated by their Gentile neighbors, especially the Irish during the heavy immigrations that followed the potato famines and divided this whole section into an unending battlefield. The Jews by tradition are not cowards, though they have through modern history been compelled to be on the defensive as a minority everywhere.

Out of these early conflicts rose some of the toughest and most murderous gangsters in American history—Little Augie, Kid Dropper, and the Murder, Inc. mob led by Lepke and Gurrah. Once they learned they had to battle, they became fierce warriors with knife, gun and every other equipment.

There are still four Yiddish daily newspapers, all prosperous and all with different policies as to politics, orthodoxy and the never-ending controversy of the Jew in every land to which he drifts—assimilation.

One organ pleads for organization and Americanization, even intermarriage and decentralization of the ghetto; another is passionately for rigid maintenance of Jewish customs and traditions and all the age-old tenets, such as Sabbath observation, kosher food, even the mikveh, according to which every married and marriageable female is expected to bathe in a community establishment at certain times.

Between the completely "emancipated" and the extremely orthodox there still remains a segment which has cut away from the old but still fears to ignore completely the God of Israel.

As a result there are thousands of Jews who pay no heed to the ways of their forefathers excepting on the high religious holidays—Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana and the Passover. For these there is a rush to get room in the few remaining synagogues. It is not impossible that the ticket scalpers will yet take these bonanza days over.

One of the pet stories having to do with this condition is told of a shabby little tailor who rushed up to the "schul," the synagogue, on one of these holy days. The pews had been sold weeks in advance at high rentals. The sexton stepped in and barked: "Ticket!" "I have no ticket." "If you have no ticket you can't get in." "But I got to get in. I got to see my rich brother. He is in there." "That's a lot of hooey." "But I tell you I got to see my brother—it's a matter from life and death." "Well, if it's life and death O.K. Go in and see your brother and come right out ... and don't you let me catch you praying!"

c.—The Not-So-Blue Danube

Upper Broadway, from 72nd Street to 110th, is now a mid-Europe in miniature. Many of those who sought refuge here during the 1930's—especially Austrians, Czechs and Hungarians—settled thereabouts and the atmospheric night life of middle Europe followed.

Here are stores that sell the delicacies of Central Europe and pastry shops where fat, but stylishly turned-out women gorge on rich chocolate sweetmeats washed down by the white wines of Tokay, the Rhine and Moselle.

This part of town was once one of New York's finest. Riverside Drive is one of the grand avenues of the world, with a view across the broad Hudson toward the palisades of New Jersey.

The castle of Charles M. Schwab has been demolished. The fine tree-lined West End Avenue, and upper Broadway with its grassy center lane, all are frayed and frowzy.

Now a score of small and medium-sized clubs purvey what purports to be the food and entertainment of Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague and Sofia.

But it mostly boils down to a gypsy fiddle and a bowl of goulash.

d.—Little Italy

Not long ago, the center of Italian life was Mulberry Street, near the historic Five Points and police headquarters. Here one went in search of such Italian delicacies as pizza and ravioli.

In the years between the two World Wars, older immigrants gradually became Americanized. Italians, last of the large racial groups before the Puerto Ricans came to colonize, soon became one of the most populous and most dominant minorities.

Little Italys took root all over the five boroughs. Italian restaurants blossomed forth in every part of town, to run the Chinese chop suey parlors a close race for the trade of those who like exotic foods.

The sons and daughters of Italy went into show business, trade and politics, and their domination extended to vice, crime and gangsterism, but also to the sciences and fine arts.

It is scarcely an exaggeration today to speak of all New York as one huge "Little Italy."

But the old world colony is still centered around Mulberry Street, running north from Canal and west from the Bowery. Here is the acrid odor of Naples—garlic and garbage, dirty restaurants, plump, dark-eyed hookers, evil billiard halls and saloons where a pint of red ink still sells for two bits and you don't have to park your stiletto at the door.

Another fragrant little Italy skirts the borders of Greenwich Village.

But in ex-Congressman Marcantonio's East Harlem the poorest and most crime-ridden Little Italy in all the world begrimes New York.

e.—Stromberry Poy

Though Greece was a land of noble statesmen and warriors, most of her sons who settled in New York are engaged in the less exalted though more necessary work of filling hungry American bellies.

A large proportion of the fruit and vegetable business, wholesale and retail, is controlled by Greeks; lunch rooms and cheaper restaurants are almost Greek monopolies.

However, oddly enough, many Hellenes make their living in the huge needle-trades industry. A majority of fur workers are Greek, though most of the plants are owned by Jews.

There are self-made Greek millionaires, too; but they live on estates in Westchester when they are not on their ranches in California.

The hub of the Greek colony is in 58th Street, from Eighth to Ninth Avenues, with restaurants, hotels and bawdy houses. No place for any but Hellenes. English spoken, but seldom understood. Another Greek settlement is at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, near the fur market.

f.—Modern Babel

The map of midtown Manhattan is more of a racial hodgepodge than the Balkans ever were, with cabarets, eating places (see Appendix F) and wenches in every idiom.

One of the city's largest French sections is in the 40's, west of Eighth Avenue, with little ground floor bistros in musty old rooming houses and broads smelling of powerful perfume.

Armenians and Turks, historic enemies, live and eat in the 20's, on the East Side, near Lexington, and the Hungarian section is in the east 60's before you come to Yorkville. Here the females are fat.

The corner of 110th and Fifth, with its West Indian population, looks like the seamy side of any large Caribbean town, and stinks worse.

There are Persians living in East 58th Street.

International House, near Columbia University, at Riverside Drive and 122nd Street, houses students and visitors from all sections of the globe and of all colors, shades and varieties.

Men live in one wing, women in the other, and if the steel door which separates them, but is never locked because of fire regulations, is opened, a bell clangs throughout the building. (Hell of a Good Neighbor policy!)

11. BLACK GHETTO

There were Negro freemen on Manhattan Island before the Revolutionary War. New York never was a station in the abolitionist underground.

The race was represented by only a few scattered thousands at the beginning of the present century. The heavy influx began shortly thereafter in a drive by industry seeking cheap labor.

Agents were sent to the South to recruit whole train-loads of black people to throw into unskilled work against the Irish, Italians and others who were already becoming troublesome to the industrial moguls with demands for higher wages. The pay spurned as too low by the whites looked big to the cotton pickers and ditch diggers of Dixie.

The Negro population grew rapidly. So did the spirit of resentment and hatred which surrounded them everywhere, despite the Northern fiction of race equality.

Not only were the Negroes driven together for protection against a powerful prejudice which kept their lives miserable and unsafe, but they found themselves caught in a ring, welded by small and big owners of real estate, which literally caged them in.

The net result has been the most congested ghetto on the American continent—Harlem.

In the tiny area of Harlem there is now a population of around 650,000—approximately that of the full census of Pittsburgh or San Francisco proper.

There has been practically no new housing built there in decades. The crumbling firetraps, almost all of them still owned by whites, and many by millionaires, have seen little improvement in provisions for sanitation, much less for human comfort. But per room, the rents exacted often equal many in the luxury edifices of gilded Park Avenue.

These thousands of dark-skinned people are truly displaced persons—held in a concentration camp surrounded by the barbed-wire fence of ironclad prejudice. But they attend free schools. They go to the polls. Therefore, maneuvered by slick politicians, white and black, they have become an enormous power. But little of this power is used for their benefit.

Until some 20 years ago tradition and the memory of Abe Lincoln made almost every Negro anywhere a Republican. The Republican machine in New York took this for granted and counted in the Harlem votes automatically before the elections.

A metamorphosis began with the organization of the American Labor party and the growth of the Communist party. These radical groups were weak and poor. They had no hope of electing anyone, and therefore could promise anything to everyone. Negroes, who had nothing to lose, began to be attracted.

For the first time they found themselves wanted, courted, flattered.

The Republicans suddenly woke up to find Harlem slipping away. They joined the parade, and held out new big promises of patronage. They suddenly grew conscious of social obligations, too, a new line for the G.O.P.

Everyone hopped the bandwagon in this new crusade—for the Negro vote. But the Negroes had been inflamed over their grievances and preferred to nurse them, now that self-seekers had acknowledged and emphasized them. Besides, the Republican party never won local elections anyway.

On the crest of this wave rose a shrewd little opportunist named Fiorello H. LaGuardia. He took over Harlem as a private preserve with a fusion of both the Republican and A.L.P. bodies of New York. After he was elected mayor, he sent to Congress, to succeed him from the fringe of Harlem, one Vito Marcantonio, a stooge who had worked in his law office.

With Marcantonio the local leader (State Chairman of the A.L.P.) and LaGuardia for a round dozen years in the City Hall, the pay-off began. The unfortunate Negroes, who had been cuffed and confined so long, were suddenly silk-gloved and pampered, made virtually immune from the police and the law. In this tight little empire ruled by the LaGuardia-Marcantonio axis, everything went, short of, and sometimes including, murder in the first degree.

Harlem, which had once been notoriously frustrated, now sprang into a peculiarly privileged status in reference to the city's laws.

Those of the dark-skinned citizens who were eager to lead decent and normal lives for themselves and their children found the situation worse than before. Instead of emancipation from the sordid conditions in which they were confined, the political need to keep them in one district was added to their bonds. And they saw their disreputable elements abetted in lawlessness.

Here were some 260,000 votes in one bag. The political sharks knew just the way to play to make them stay put.

The results were disastrous, as many dismayed respectable Negroes found, especially among the growing youth. The police, who carried night sticks in the lobby of Madison Square Garden and Grand Central Palace, pounded the flagstones of Harlem empty-handed and all but handcuffed.

The meekness and silent suffering which had marked the Negroes in a city of a hostile majority went with the new wind. They got practically nothing tangible from their new protectors. The bad physical conditions remained, the conspiracy of prejudice which imprisoned them remained. But their emotional release and mounting anger against their wrongs grew. That crime and immorality under these bizarre conditions should increase was inevitable.

This metamorphosis was taking place during the later years of Prohibition, when lawlessness was smart, sin a laugh, and decency a joke. In their landlocked area of poverty and congestion, when gangsters, flappers and gigolos were symbolic and many college boys were getting out of hand throughout the country, young Harlem threw away the book.

Decent Negroes, seeking only a normal existence, were appalled. But the tough elements had the support of the dominant political power; and Harlem was a trap from which few could escape.

An occasional Negro was appointed to public office; a few got into civil service; a dribble made the professions. But by and large the wretched economic and social conditions of the race remained, and remain today, not greatly changed over the plight of the race a generation ago.

Today, Harlem is a politician's stronghold. The ward heelers, their bosses and their friends rate high political favoritism. Harlem has this kind of equality, but no other.

The result has been sad.

As this chapter proceeds, the authors will not attempt to review in connection with each incident or observation the abnormal and unique circumstances which have corrupted much of the life of this gigantic Negro concentration camp. They will proceed to tell of Harlem as they know it and have seen it. In Harlem, of course, are many thousands of God-fearing Negro families thoroughly dismayed by the violence, vice and excesses which now exist there, and which will probably continue to exist as long as Harlem remains the exploited landlocked island that it is. Many who could took their families to the Sugar Hill district, where live the more prosperous Negroes, or to the several tree-shaded streets where life continues to flow by rather quietly and respectably.

But in other sections of the district, robbery, rape and murder are rampant and raw. Prostitution is scandalous. With certain elements, assault has become not only a profession, but a pastime.

The New York newspapers, by common habit, rarely publish anything about Harlem crime. The city editor looks at the address and spikes the item.

Police shrug their shoulders and turn their backs not only on complaints, but on misdemeanors and felonies within their own sight. This is especially true where no whites are involved.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Harlem was made out of bounds for white service personnel, with armed M.P.'s and S.P.'s stationed at close intervals. Night life became practically one hundred per cent Harlem-patronized.

The days when a metropolitan black belt was picturesque and novel are gone. The decade and more when low-class and high-priced slumming in black-and-tan dives was a big-city fad has passed, too.

Today, Harlem's chief attraction is the famous Savoy Ballroom. This is not a taxi dance hall. There are no hostesses or hired partners. The gents bring their own dames or pick up unaccompanied girls, who also pay their way in. Most of these are not out-and-out hustlers. In the old days the Savoy was a wow. The unrestrained dancing and the first roots of jive and boogie-woogie were beginning to appear. Both the music and the hoofing were fascinating to outsiders. But now few whites come to the doors of the Savoy, and those who do are firmly discouraged from entering.

America stole the Negroes to work the land it stole from the Indians. It has not played white with either.

The living, throbbing Harlem—110th Street, 116th Street, 125th Street, 135th Street, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, the west side of Fifth Avenue from 110th Street up—those highways which in their time have known throngs of sightseers, which in the heyday of Harlem hotspots housed cabarets and after-hour joints known around the world, are now beset by gangsters, streetwalkers, sluggers and muggers who often bash and slash for the mere mischief and sadism of inflamed imagination and unbridled, coddled encouragement to misbehave.

On these and the dimly lit side streets which cross them property and life are rarely safe.

Here white detectives dare not travel except in pairs; here rent-collectors dare not go about or enter buildings without cops to guard them; here is no place for sightseers or any strangers.

Here rove the numerous gangs, members ranging in number from a dozen to several hundred and in age from almost babyhood to the "heavy workers," who include many ex-convicts.

Harlem first got on the map as a place to have fun during the 1920's, when an imaginative fellow named Lee Posner, who later adopted as a middle name "Harlemania," saw its possibilities after the Chicago "black-and-tan" fad had risen to popularity. Jack Johnson, the ex-heavyweight champion, had a saloon on Seventh Avenue. This became the Cotton Club which, with all Harlem, started toward world-wide fame.

Prohibition was in effect if not in force, but the snoopers passed this district up.

The black part of Harlem was tucked away in the northern half of what is now the section. Its main cross street, 125th, was still lined with fine shops and branches of downtown department stores. Below that thoroughfare old New York families still lived and there were excellent apartment buildings and elegant residences.

By 1930, the Negroes had everything from 110th Street up to the Polo Grounds, at 155th Street, to themselves.

Repeal brought a change to Harlem's night life. The fad had worn thin and the attractions of unlimited liquor and no set hours had faded. Some of the glitter spots moved downtown—Connie's Inn, the Cotton Club, the Ubangi. New cabarets with all-Negro talent began to spring up in the center of town.

When the casual pleasure-seekers forsook Harlem, a few wise boys took over in side-street locations. New York's legal liquor and cabaret closing deadline has been 4 A.M., since repeal. But that was too early for some, especially those connected with the major night clubs, who quit work at that hour and then wanted to play.

Harlem, which was not being called to account on police regulations, took up where the big ones left off.

Many of the remaining joints didn't put on their first shows until after 4 A.M., and they remained open as late as the last customer could lift a glass. Your authors remember often leaving such places at 10 or 11 o'clock next morning, climbing out of a smoke-filled and dingy basement into broad daylight, their eyes smarting.

It was in this period that the "ofays," Harlem's word for whites, began mixing openly. Several female name stars were soon notorious for such habits.

There are very few houses of commercial prostitution in Harlem. They are not needed. Women are too easy to pick up. And they don't have to be picked up.

A man of the world can spot a whore by instinct, no matter what her color. But the Harlem wenches refuse to credit so much intelligence. They have a hundred brazen approaches. One of the commonest is to lead a little dog on a leash, and as a white man comes within hearing, ostensibly addressing the dog, she says:

"You come on with me now. You come on right in the house with me."

If there is any doubt as to what or whom she means, she is dangling the key to her apartment in her other hand. From this up to the most ancient methods, straightforward or from the corner of the mouth, "How'd you like to have a good time, mister?" they fear neither daylight, nightlight nor darkness.

This of itself shocks no one, least of all those whose names are on the cover of this book.

But back of it is a great deal more than the danger of venereal disease, which is inordinately high in these regions, and a sense of having sinned.

The white man who falls for these lures will probably be robbed, perhaps beaten and possibly murdered.

On one morning, on the roof of a squalid walkup, four white men were found strangled and stripped, their bodies thrown behind a chimney. This was the work of one prostitute whose pimp and accomplice crouched in hiding, and when each man was least likely to have his wits and caution, came up over him and choked him to death with bare hands while the woman held him helpless.

This, of course, is an extreme instance. But cases of "badger" workers are everyday occurrences; a white man is no sooner in an embarrassing position but in comes a Negro who claims to be the woman's "husband," and—usually with a weapon, but sometimes only on a threat of arrest—cleans the victim of all he has with him. There are also "panel" houses. These work by having the woman help the man take his clothing off and place it in a certain position, probably over a convenient chair. While he is concentrated on thoughts other than his watch and money, a panel slides open, a dark hand comes through and takes everything out of the pockets.

When a man has finished with such an amour, he generally feels a bit of revulsion and is eager to get out. Therefore he usually does not realize that he has been frisked and by the time he does, he is reluctant to return and is probably afraid, realizing that he has been in a thieves' den. Should he ask a policeman to go with him, he would have to explain how and why he was there in the first place. Should he return alone, he would probably get no answer at the bell, or if he did it would be with a beer bottle or a knife.

The same effect is often attained without a confederate. The woman goes through the man's clothes while he is in no frame of mind to keep his hands on his pockets. This is subtly known in Harlem as "cold finger work."

The cost of living has gone up here as it has everywhere. The price of a woman, 20 years ago, in Harlem was from 25 cents up. Today a good-looking one, especially if she is not leading a man to be skinned, has no compunction about asking $20.

Surely, the most ardent protagonist of Harlem will not challenge its predilection towards sexual and other vices.

Practically every novel and factual exposé by Negro writers and by white writers who glorify Negroes is replete with accounts of illicit relations between white men and dark girls. The Negro newspapers harp on it constantly. And if more proof is needed, contemplate the fact that the largest dance hall in Harlem was closed by the License Commissioner because it was overrun with 12-year-old Negro prostitutes; and one of the larger theatres in Harlem was closed by the License Commissioner because of indescribable orgies in the balcony during theatrical performances.

The result of these disclosures and the hundreds of muggings has been to drive the New York white element, except for an occasional and misguided drunken sailor, out of the area.

Mugging has nothing to do with sex. It is a white invention, in old Chicago days called "strongarming." The technique is for a man or woman—it is operated by both—to come up behind a man or a woman and throw an arm around the front of the throat, closing it sharply, with the elbow out. This gives an immediate condition of semi-helplessness and the defense against it is difficult because both hands are not as strong as one arm. At the same time, the mugger shoves a knee into the small of the back of the victim, further devitalizing him or her and throwing off any balance which might permit of a struggle. By this time one or more co-workers are going through the handbag or the pockets.

Often those selected by such criminals are persons who have been seen in saloons or elsewhere with valuables or sums of money worth the effort. In not a few cases, where victims have put up a struggle, they were stabbed or choked to death.

The comparatively high-class Negro cafés with entertainment which flourished during Prohibition were put out of business by a number of concurrent consequences.

The kindly, grinning, amiable and frequently obsequious Negro was disappearing. In his place came a truculent, class-conscious, race-conscious and union-conscious, embittered man or woman, resenting whites and demanding white wages.

The early clubs, with their all-night white carriage trade, their quick and friendly waiters and their low-comedy performers had to fold. Negroes working for a white employer demanded white men's pay. Negro workers insulted white patrons. The new trend decried Negroes stooping to low comedy—the calling was for dignity; no more thick red lips or prop watermelons or plantation togs. Why shouldn't they sing grand opera? Why shouldn't they play Shakespeare? They have done both, with here and there some success, often overestimated by "tolerant" critics, but there is no more Negro theatre and there is practically no Negro entertainment as it was known so long, a native American institution.

The minstrel show, which was at one time tops in popularity on our stages, was wiped out forever, far ahead of the Uncle Tom shows, which the CIO and the societies for the advancement of colored people picketed out of existence.

There are three good-sized night clubs in Harlem now. They play to very few whites, except those who regularly "mix." It may surprise many of our readers to know that in the constantly growing mingling of whites and Negroes, white women with black men are far more numerous than white men with black women.

The Harlem community accepts—though it despises—these Caucasians who cross the color line, or as it is known above 110th Street, "change their luck" or "deal in coal."

It is common knowledge that girls and women associated with night life to a certain degree have long crossed the line. These are usually dope addicts. That does not mean that many of them are not fresh and young and desirable.

From the days of earliest slavery in the United States and the West Indies, Negroes have swept away their heavy inhibitions, forgotten the burn of the lash and the clank of the shackles with an age-old drug, hashish.

Hashish was used among the ancients to stimulate armies for ruthless killing.

It has since become known as locoweed and in Harlem it is commonly called "tea," and the cigarettes made therefrom are called "reefers" or "muggles." Technically, in the United States Drug Act legislation, this weed, containing a chemical substance known as cannabine, is called marijuana.

No amount of vigilance can stamp out marijuana. It grows anywhere. The Negro chauffeur of one of the authors of this book saved enough money to buy a farm—to grow nothing but marijuana. Acres of it have been found within the city limits of New York and in its environs. It can be grown in back yards and even in window boxes and will flourish.

Because this innocent-looking weed is so prolific and so hardy, a special police class has lectured on its idiosyncrasies. The students were ordered then to keep a keen eye out and if they saw any of it to report it to a specified bureau.

Only one turned in a holler. He had discerned it on a lawn. He gave the address.

An expert was rushed there by auto. He found it, all right—it was in the front yard of a police station!

One plant, which does not occupy more than a square inch of dirt and does not require more than four times that much for nourishment will grow 100 seeds (pistilates). Crushed with the pods and leaves and rolled, that plant will make ten reefers.

The cigarettes come in three qualities—"sars-fras"—the cheapest kind, sold to thousands of school children at about two bits each; the "panatella," or "messerole," retailed at fifty cents; and the top grade, the "gungeon," which produces a voluptuous "bang," bringing as high as a dollar.

There are about 500 apartments in Harlem, known as "tea pads," set up exclusively for marijuana addicts. They are darkly lit, the colors are usually deep blue, there is a juke box or victrola with the jumpiest of jive records. An insidious incense pervades the stuffy air; windows are always closed. The walls are usually scrawled with crude nudes and pornographic sketches.

Here gather the reefer smokers for their "binge." That's the origin of the word for a drunk in modern slang. And drunk is how they get. The first few puffs create an almost painful parching of the throat. This calls for liquor to wet the whistle. The combination of marijuana and alcohol brings on a complete flight of conscience, restraint, decency and shame.

What occurs after such a debauch gets going, in a small flat, with two or three bedrooms and an assemblage of interracial participants of both sexes, will not be described here.

Broadway and theatrical women are not necessarily looser than other women. But for many years, and especially during the 20's and 30's, in vaudeville and musical revues it became the custom to introduce Negroes into companies with whites; especially Negro musicians, who undoubtedly have certain generic talents which white men cannot match.

It is a matter of long record that bandsmen rank high in the lists of narcotics users. Many of our best-known white musicians have been in public trouble over this weakness and thousands of others are known within the profession to be so inclined.

Through the combination of the mingling of Negroes who used marijuana when other dope was cheap and plentiful and still used it and could get it and had established places to smoke it as the other drugs evaporated, white women learned where they could get a "belt," a "jolt" or a "gow." Reefer-smokers are called "gowsters."

To those who are "hooked," which in the argot means they have the habit, the tea pad sessions are known as "kicking the gong around." That's the origin of this often misused bit of modern idiom. A newcomer into the fold is called a "joy popper." Occasional or slummers who manage to crash, through a "connection," are called "RFD gowsters." When one becomes so habituated that marijuana is an incurable obsession, "the monkey is riding on his (or her) back."

Recently there has been a steady infiltration of society, bohemian and co-ed recruits among white females who go to Harlem for its lurid pleasures. Many women in the professional labor movement have heard the call to prove openly that they are broad-minded. Many avowed Communists all but push themselves on the Negroes and it is a tenet of the party line in New York City that white women must go out of their way to mingle with the colored comrades.

Not all these mix hashish with their politics. But sex is considered a mandatory gesture of complete conversion.

Ironically enough, while all this over-emphasis on tolerance, equality and the brotherhood of man has taken on the magnitude of big business, the Negroes are decidedly anti-Semitic, and Jew-baiting is a constant maneuver in organized and disorganized form. Certain Negro gangs, mostly composed of zoot-suited teen-agers, make a regular practice of it and call it "Jew-hunting." They find fertile ground for it in the nearby Bronx and set off on expeditions to beat up Jewish children going to and from school.

To understand the Negro as a gangster one must look with accusing eyes at the white toughs who so long terrorized the Negroes.

Wherever the blacks poured across a street to take up new habitations that would accommodate the constant influx from the South and widening opportunities for those already in the North, seeking to escape from their hideous encirclement under unspeakable conditions, they were fought and often killed by hooligans from such old mobs as the Hancocks, the Irish Dukes, the Rainbows and the Goat Hill Hoodlums, who originated in the days of Irish squatter possession of Lexington Avenue and west, north of 96th Street.

The Negroes defended themselves the best they could, and under the guidance of grownup "captains and war counsellors," as they are still known, they organized what now constitutes about 75 gangs in upper Manhattan. They run from 25 to 40 and some to 200.

Among the principal Negro gangs are the Sabres, the Socialists, the Chancellors, the Buccaneers, the Copians, the Barons and the Slicksters.

Their activities now range from fighting each other for the pure love of bloodshed (called "rumbles") to highway robbery. Often fights are faked so that in the confusion and the crowd a quick job of larceny is inconspicuous.

The Chancellors, a strict organization with rank and titles, according to age, strength, bravado and accomplishments, is typical. The groups run progressively up from Tiny Tims to Midgets to Juniors to Seniors. Each class takes orders from the one above and all are as strictly ruled and disciplined as were the Czar's Cossacks, by their war counsellors, known as "bigs."

Not the least of their power is in their auxiliaries, girls ranging from 12 years up, who start as Sub-debs and graduate to become Debs. They are usually the mistresses of the Seniors. Their roles are important before, during and after acts of violence.

By police regulations, only females may search females. The Debs and Sub-debs are usually from 50 to 500 feet behind the warriors. They carry the weapons. Should there be a sudden police charge, the girls evaporate in all directions and the men are found unarmed. But the moment the first fist flies, they rush in and slip the took to the Chancellors. Very often they join in the fight with them and punch, bite and stab, and are quite as vicious as the males.

The weapons, featuring the switch-blade spring knife which is the Harlem standby, also run to first-rate shooting arms and homemade guns which are converted from lengths of tubing. Billies, sword-canes and ice-picks are standard equipment. The harmless-looking souvenir toy bats sold at the ball parks, which can crack a skull at a single swipe, are regularly employed.

Developed from self-defense against the whites, the lust for battle and pillage has become a menace to the respectable Negroes. No colored gangster will stoop to work. Once he belongs, he must make his living with his fists and weapons or he must have a woman support him. Harlem is probably the only community on earth where the women earn more money than do the men. Thousands of them are employed as servants and others do well plying less savory trades. It is regarded as manly and superior for a man to be kept, and to prove his masculinity he is expected occasionally to beat his woman to show her who is master.

The younger thugs, who have not reached that lofty estate, but who must not attempt to be Alger boys, bluntly live by robbery. In some sections a Negro boy or girl not belonging to a powerful gang scarcely dares leave home with a nickel. In addition to being despoiled, they are frequently manhandled.

As a result, many Negro families have sent their children to New Jersey and Long Island and even back south of the Mason and Dixon Line because of the intolerable abuses from their own race.

In fact, Congressman Powell, whose district comprises Harlem, and his actress wife spend most of their time on Long Island. Powell, a light-skinned, but professional Negro and bleeding heart, and Mrs. Powell—Hazel Scott—ride in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac limousine. Miss Scott was cited as a left-winger by the Un-American Activities committee.

On his own statement, a 13-year-old Negro boy, who held up a white schoolteacher at gun point and was caught while fleeing, a clasp knife in his hand and his .32-calibre revolver in his belt, was a member of the Purple Cross gang, with a hangout at 114th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.

He was ambitious to join the Turks, a gang of older boys. He was told he would have to prove he was tough enough. The Turk leaders gave him the gun and told him to pull a stick-up—"then come back and we'll see about taking you in."

One juvenile Harlem gang has another test—before a tyro can be accepted as a full member, he must commit a rape!

The Negroes took merciless punishment in the big depression. And the recovery was slow for them. By 1940 they were angry and sullen. Then hell broke loose, fomented by meddlesome agitators of both races. A bloody and paralyzing race riot exploded.

The police, suddenly allowed to wade in with night-sticks, finished it quickly. But the causes could not be clubbed down. The resentment and bitterness went underground, to emerge through influences described above, but with few flare-ups because the whites virtually quit going to Harlem.

For months, no taxi driver would take whites to Harlem destinations, and some even refused to drive through the district. Even today few white hackmen will take you to a Harlem number or answer a hail in that region.

The muggings and the stick-ups soon began to slop far over the borders and today the extent of Negro crime in all the boroughs scandalizes the decent elements of the race. White men have the money. And since they no longer come up to be taken, the goons spread to greener fields.

Lait and Mortimer have set up above only a camera-eye fragment of their long experience and what they learned first-hand in courts, police stations, and day and night contacts with every class and phase of New York's metropolitan manifestations.

They have eaten in Harlem hideaways and imbibed at Harlem's beehive bars. They have had the confidence of Negro detectives, who are too ashamed of the behavior of some of their people to gloss it over.

This chapter will reform nothing. It was written with no such intent. Its sole function is to inform, and the information should serve as a warning.

Harlem is no place for joy hoppers or joy poppers. Outside of the few white people who have business there and who are familiarly recognized, the sight of a white person in the black precincts brings one of several instant reactions:

If it's a white man "on the make," the Negroes are infuriated, though the dregs of their own women are there to solicit him; if a white woman is seen, she is either a tramp or a nut with a yen for colored men, and though plenty of colored men are willing, Harlem looks on her as a pariah and an intruder; if a white man and wife walk the avenues, looking curiously here and there, they are peepers who regard the Negroes as the zoo visitors do the exhibits in their cages; if white men go to the worst parts of Harlem to get drunk—God help them.

The old days are over. Gawkers and the idly curious who don't know their Harlem may gamble their very lives. Therefore, the gospel of this chapter is: If you haven't legitimate business there—

Stay Away From Harlem!

12. AND YE TOOK ME IN!

During the last 12 years and growing every year, there has descended on Manhattan Island like a locust plague an influx of Puerto Ricans.

They arrive now frequently at the rate of 2,000 a month and there are today more than 600,000 natives of the island (one authority calculates 710,000) cramped, some 30 in one cold-water flat, mostly in one section of this great island, the whole of which is much smaller than theirs in area.

One of every four persons born in this generation in Puerto Rico is in New York; one of every 13 New Yorkers is a Puerto Rican.

Referring to these Caribbean wards of the nation as a plague is not prompted by prejudice, anger or careless use of phraseology.

Puerto Ricans were not born to be New Yorkers. They are mostly crude farmers, subject to congenital tropical diseases, physically unfitted for the northern climate, unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking and almost impossible to assimilate and condition for healthful and useful existence in an active city of stone and steel.

It would be tragic enough if the sorry results were the consequences only of desperate displaced persons fleeing to a haven of hope from the circumscribed possibilities of their birthplace.

But the story is far more sordid. A majority of these people were lured here deliberately, because, as American citizens, they can vote. They are a power behind ex-Congressman Vito Marcantonio, until recently the only American Labor Party member of the House, who rules the wretched section into which a majority of the 600,000 have poured from leaky ships and from miserable chartered planes which are almost beyond description.

The Puerto Ricans at this moment are costing New York City $12,000,000 a year in relief. There is no residence-period requirement, that having been knocked out during the LaGuardia administration, when Marcantonio's word could wipe out law.

Not only are many of these Puerto Ricans on relief within an hour after their feet land on a dock or a secondary airport, but some are already booked on the dole in advance, while they are in the air or on the water.

Until recently Marcantonio maintained a full-time representative in the office of the Welfare Department, whose business it was to get his constituents not only registered on the rolls but also provided with fat and flowing allowances, using broadly every channel created for emergency cases. Now it is done surreptitiously, but still done.

For voting, the law requires one year in the state, four months in the county, one month in the district. But it is impossible to check, even if the holdover handout officials would want to. The Puerto Ricans all look alike, their names all sound alike and if an inspector calls in one of the swarming flats in the teeming tenements, nobody speaks English.

Travel agencies whip up the movement through agents in Puerto Rico. The newspapers and the bill-boards and even signs stuck beside the dirt roads of the remote regions shout with bargain rates as low as $20 for a flight to New York; ship transportation is sometimes even cheaper than that.

Very few Puerto Ricans at home have or ever have had $20. But the money seems to come from somewhere.

Privately, these poverty-numbed, naïve natives are sold a bill of the tremendous possibilities in the great New York which they have seen in the movies and in the patent insides of their local sheets. They are told that here fortunes await many and the rest can quickly go on relief for sums undreamt-of by them or their fathers' fathers.

The result is a sullen, disappointed, disillusioned mass of people, alien to everything that spells New York. The children quickly learn to resent the fact that, though they are Americans, they are foreigners who cannot speak the language and are thus teased and humiliated in schools and on the streets.

Because they are dark of complexion, they are commonly classified as Negroes and share a large portion of the unfortunate prejudice which still bedevils non-Caucasians, even in a community as broad-minded as New York.

Few can obtain employment, though Marcantonio and a few other politicians place them, to a conspicuous disproportion, in minor public jobs, in hospitals, prisons, public works and other institutions where no skills and no English are required.

The youths of both sections run wild. They take on the vilest habits of their surroundings, and the description elsewhere in this book of conditions in Harlem apply very generally to the sections where the Puerto Ricans have swarmed.

As in the case of Harlem, the Puerto Ricans are concentrated in a small area but do not entirely make that their pleasure ground.

During the last two years there has been a steady flow toward Broadway, until the corners in the lower 50's are crowded day and night with zoot-suited men who hang around the riffraff of the amusement centers and so behave that it has long been necessary to post extra police south of Columbus Circle, around the clock.

They soon become marijuana addicts, throng into cheap and crowded dives which cater to their trade, and many become violent criminals with gun and knife. Many of them are dope-peddlers while on relief.

In their own district the children are natural cop-haters, throw stones at prowl cars and drop bricks from the roofs on uniformed policemen.

There are no tougher saloons in Marseilles, Shanghai, Port Said or Panama City than those which seethe with these island immigrants. 108th Street and Second Avenue is the headquarters of the international dope racket.

The crime rate is stupendous and it is increasing and spreading.

One General Sessions judge who had just finished a six-week trial calendar of criminal cases covering the entire borough of Manhattan reported to one of your authors that more than 40 per cent of convictions during that term had been of Puerto Ricans, of whom 2 per cent were born on the United States mainland.

The disease statistics are even more shocking.

Not a few of the natives are cursed with tuberculosis and syphilis before they arrive; a Puerto Rican leper was discovered not long ago. But once they are here, the venereal incidence is marked with a rapid rise, due to association with low prostitutes, with the result that a random health inspection of 1,000 Puerto Rican males between the ages of 15 and 40 revealed 80 per cent infected.

The conditions which cause these frightful statistics are largely parallel to those which afflict the Negroes, but the Puerto Ricans are harmed even more by these conditions because they are strangers, because they have not come of their own free will, like adventurers of courage and enterprise from other lands, who brave regions beyond their horizon to fight for their opportunities.

Most of these are not only outmatched in every battle of life in the fastest and biggest city in the world, but they were far behind in their own unhappy land before they left, and that was why they left.

The callous exploitation of these weaklings is one of the dirtiest crimes in the long and shameful record of practical American politics. None knows better than those who have primed and prompted and financed the exodus, what they are doing to these victims and what they are doing to the city where they bring them in gutted one-motor planes, sitting on bucket seats, sometimes so crowded that many stand all the way, air-sick and already homesick.

The sight of one of these outmoded flying cattle boats, long since discarded by the government services and regular transport lines, is horrifying and nauseating.

The pilgrims are dropped off at Newark or small private landing places, carrying bundles and babies and the weight of fear and sorrow, through which the gleam of new hope cannot penetrate.

They are marched in and carried in dilapidated buses directly to the filthy, shrieking, miserable rookeries where housing has long been exhausted. This means that each new arrival will be shoe-horned into already jammed, unsanitary, indecent lodgings, to sleep on the floor or even in a hallway.

The relief figures look good and they should, because they are designedly excessive. But prices are high and before these strangers arrive the sharks are waiting and smacking their lips.

And so they constitute not only a horde unfitted for the new habitat, but they quickly become resentful under the hostile conditions, so different from the utopia which smooth-tongued agents painted to people who had never been off the island on which they were born.

Not only that frame of mind, but public support, with a tremendous factor of idleness, proximity to the regions of lowest vice and highest crime, easy opportunity to mingle in the swirl of the unwashed underworld, rapidly perverts them.

They pick up the bad habits of those with whom they are forced to associate, and these they amplify with the enthusiasm of untutored islanders for illegitimate revelry and dissipation.

Merchants of every form of dope, vice and alcohol await them eagerly with merchandise within their means.

Finding themselves unable physically, mentally or financially to compete, they turn to guile and wile and the steel blade, the traditional weapon of the sugar-cane cutter, mark of their blood and heritage.

New York, of course, is not easily pushed around and turns on them, which makes them more bitter and more belligerent, which brings upon them heavier punishment, which makes them uglier, and thus a constant and increasing spiral of hatred spins around these hundreds of thousands.

Some manage to straggle back. But it is an established fact that the city holds and fascinates and imprisons those who have once felt the magic of its embrace.

Columbia University made a survey of the situation. The governor of Puerto Rico put through an appropriation for the island legislature to run down the facts. The Welfare Department of the city and state have thrown up their hands in helpless surrender to this modern scandal, entirely unforeseen only a few years ago, though Puerto Ricans have had free access without passport to the United States since 1898.

The City Welfare Council, in a sympathetic report glossing over much of the situation, nevertheless described "back yards piled high with garbage," also one block so infested with drunks, marijuana smokers, brawlers, holdup men and insulters of women that decent citizens and even the police deliberately avoid it.

So, this chapter is not merely an observation about a portion of Manhattan Island. It is an exposition of a situation which will echo in the halls of Congress and will write its own pages in the history of the nation, because, as has been pointed out, it is far from static; in every phase it is growing and the sorry end is nowhere in sight.

13. UP IN CENTRAL PARK

Michael Todd, a theatrical producer who hails from Chicago, made a valuable contribution to the unorthodox history of Manhattan with the long-run hit musical play, Up in Central Park, later made into a movie.