Chapter VI: Part ONE: The Places (4)

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.

Those fortunate enough to have seen this gay operetta may remember references to a crooked land-grab in connection with the building of the park, which packed the coffers of many Tammanyites of the day.

We have thousands of acres of parks in New York; a world-famed zoo and botanical gardens in the Bronx. None, however, can compare with Central Park, a jewel of emerald green in a rectangular setting of mansions and museums and skyscrapers.

But Central Park is not the chaste oasis its verdure and placid lakes might imply.

The prime spot for a pick-up (if you're not hoity-toity) is the Central Park Mall, during the summer, though Riverside Drive runs a close second--if you're a sailor.

Some years ago, the beneficent city fathers inaugurated a program of free dances in Central Park. They were primarily designed for young men and women of the poorer districts.

They also drew degenerates, rapists and wolves.

It's standard practice there to ask any gal to dance and it doesn't seem to matter what color you are or she is.

Many fallen sisters--and very reasonably--take advantage of this frolic on the green to ply their avocation under police protection.

But the amateurs--especially the bobby sox juvenile delinquents--give them unethical competition.

Friendly bushes, in the darkness, provide privacy (of a sort) for a necking party. But those who stray too far from the well-lighted Mall invite serious danger.

Lurking in the park are all manner of anti-social characters, from footpads to vicious sex-maniacs. Blood-curdling crimes are common.

The police cannot patrol every foot of the big expanse of the park, though at times they have had remarkable success in keeping crime at a minimum by dressing a couple of boyish detectives in women's clothes and turning them loose on the scum.

The place is, of course, a happy hunting ground for psychopathic and physical irregulars, who find it an excellent layout to strike up acquaintances with others of their kind.

The southwest corner of the park, at Columbus Circle, has been pre-empted by Negro homos. The north border, Cathedral Parkway (110th) is alive with wicked wenches.

And yet, graceful old Central Park is one of the most beautiful places remaining in this modernist crazy world.

Its lights, architecture and landscaping retain the pre-rococo charm of the last century.

But the old Central Park Casino is gone, a victim of the leveling-down process of the dictatorship of the rabble.

Here, in a charming building surrounded by trees and the greensward, was one of New York's showspots of the hectic 20's where society and café society dined, danced and broke the dry law.

As Jimmy Walker's night city hall (he rarely arose in time to visit the official one), the casino attracted the cream--and the sour milk--of New York officialdom and gangdom. Its prices were outrageous, but its food divine, its liquor bona fide and its dance music memorable.

LaGuardia, darling of the déclassé, elected in 1933 on a platform of revenge and revulsion against civilized living, made the destruction of the Central Park Casino the first major issue in his campaign of social nihilism. He said the land was needed for a play-ground.

No sooner was the casino leveled than he found an excuse to open another dining and dance pavilion in the park, for concessionaires more friendly to his regime.

To do this he destroyed the historic old sheepfold, where generations of city kids learned about nature watching the grazing lambs, and turned the building into a cabaret called "The Tavern on the Green."

Though its prices are not as astronomical as those imposed by the mourned casino, they are still too high for New York's millions of low-income citizens--the voters LaGuardia said the park was for.

Tucked away on a crosswalk in the 60's is a crazy little carousel, circa last century. Here the kids ride the merry-go-round to a tinkly, wheezy calliope playing the same tunes heard there by Teddy Roosevelt. Here is one of New York's most delightful nooks for romance.

You still find the hackies at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, the last of their kind in the country. Best time to ride is after 4 A.M., when the motor traffic in the park has come to a standstill and you have the place all to yourself in a barouche or hansom.

If your doll still holds out, after winding slowly through leaf-covered roads, to the tune of the horse's cloppety-clop, wake up the driver and order him right to the morgue. She's dead.

14. NEW YORK'S DORMITORIES

We are going to go statistical on you for a few paragraphs and tell you something about the size of greater New York and the parts of it which you'll probably never get to see--and you don't know how lucky you are, at that.

The population of the incorporated city of New York is approximately 8,000,000, one out of every 17 in the land. One of every 10 Americans lives in New York's metropolitan district, which includes the overlapping areas of Westchester and Nassau counties, New Jersey and Connecticut, within 45-minutes commuting distance from Times Square.

Perhaps one of every 100 persons on earth--20,000,000--live within 100 miles of New York, are employed here, or are frequent visitors for business or pleasure.

Manhattan Island, which is the county of New York, is the core of all this, but actually it is only second in population of the city's boroughs, having about 2,000,000 permanent residents. The balance of the metropolis' huge population sleeps elsewhere.

Brooklyn, approaching 3,000,000, ranks by itself the second largest city in the nation; in area it sprawls all over the map, a maddening maze of crazy streets apparently without beginning or end.

The unwary visitor to Brooklyn who asks a policeman how to get somewhere usually is directed to return to Manhattan and start all over again. The natives don't know their way about in this gigantic and illogical patchwork.

The incorporated city of Greater New York, which was born in 1898, when the independent municipality of Brooklyn merged with Manhattan, consists of five boroughs, each coextensive with a county.

They are:

==========+==========+=============+======= _Borough_ | _County_ | _Pop. 1950_ | _Rank_ ----------+----------+-------------+------- Manhattan | New York | 1,938,551 | 2 Brooklyn | Kings | 2,720,238 | 1 Bronx | Bronx | 1,444,903 | 4 Queens | Queens | 1,546,316 | 3 Richmond | Richmond | 191,015 | 5 ----------+----------+-------------+-------

Brooklyn and Queens each occupy the westernmost end of Long Island. Manhattan is located on its island. Richmond occupies all Staten Island. The much-maligned Bronx is the sole borough on the mainland of the United States.

Richmond, historically and geographically a part of New Jersey, from which it is separated by only a narrow kill spanned by a bridge, is five miles from Manhattan, half an hour by ferry. The other boroughs are all connected with each other by land borders, bridges or tunnels.

Considerable confusion exists concerning New York's borough system, because it is the only city in the world including more than one county in its corporate limits.

The counties are not called boroughs. They merely happen to have the same geographic boundaries as the boroughs. The five counties in New York City are, like all other counties in the state, political subdivisions of the State of New York. The boroughs, on the other hand, are political subdivisions of the City of New York.

Each of New York's five counties has its own District (State's) Attorney and courts.

The borough governments, presided over by presidents who are their bailiwicks' representatives in the upper chamber of the municipal legislative body, exist merely for the purpose of superintending local improvements such as street repairs, etc.

Several tomes could be and have been written about Brooklyn, a place which, for some reason, always elicits guffaws when mentioned.

Brooklyn, with its Dodgers, is the most hysterical baseball community in the nation. It also embraces Flatbush, the Gowanus Canal, the fabled tree, a very old and snooty social set, in addition to the worst murderers of the English language north of the Mason and Dixon line.

Though most of Brooklyn's millions work and play in Manhattan, the borough is exceedingly provincial. It has many shopping districts, with fine stores, several popular-priced night clubs and a number of large theatres. Once a try-out spot for legit shows, which were also road showed in Brooklyn after their Broadway runs, Brooklyn, like many other large communities, has become fleshless. In olden days the Metropolitan Opera company appeared there--at the Brooklyn Academy of Music--every Tuesday during the season.

Both authors of this book are New York newspapermen. Yet neither has been in Brooklyn six times in 20 years, except to go to Coney Island, and that is a place one seldom visits any more.

The Coney Island you can see isn't what it was, and we wouldn't advise a trip there unless you are an antiquarian searching for rare remnants of a kaleidoscopic used-to-be. Broads who stroll the boardwalk, while often easy, usually have housemaid's knee.

The air, despite the good zestful salt sea breeze, reeks with the acrid smoke of potato knishes, garlic and frying frankfurters.

Time was when Coney's transgressions were crimson and its sinners wore silks and sables.

On the beach front, and at the adjoining Manhattan and Sheepshead beaches, were fine hotels, race tracks and fabled clubs and residences.

Mustached sports and their high-rolling ladies drank and diced, waded and swam and disappeared in pairs.

Those great levelers, the subway and the auto, which brought Coney within a dime of any part of New York, soon leveled Coney. The dime became its symbol. Luna Park is gone, destroyed by fire and never rebuilt.

Steeplechase, owned by the Tilyous, related by marriage to Brooklyn's once ruling family, the McCooeys, has the roller coaster and nut house field practically to itself, though independent operators on Surf Avenue and the Midway, who pay no park rental fee, offer some competition.

Incidentally, the first roller coaster in the world is still in operation at Coney.

The zenith of the Coney season is the annual Mardi Gras, shortly after Labor Day, modeled after New Orleans' gala event, with local variations and no improvements.

The residents of the other boroughs, like the inhabitants of Brooklyn, are chiefly concerned with sleeping and breeding. If you find these a contradiction in terms, you don't know what they can do in the Bronx and Queens.