The Street That Never Slept: New York's Fabled 52nd Street

"Shoddy, bawdy and boozy,"" 52nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, before the strip joints and the concrete office buildings, was New York's answer to Bourbon Street, Beale Street, Sunset Boulevard and Montparnasse. Shaw, songsmith and musician's friend, was a devoted habitue who knew the passwords to the speakeasies (the street had 38 during Prohibition); the hot horns from the cool; and who dined with whom at Jack and Charlie's 21. From the Onyx, to Leon and Eddie's to Kelly's Stable, Jimmy Ryan's and the Famous Door he offers a guided tour and brings on former customers, proprietors, performers -- Johnny Mercer, Dizzy Gillespie, stripper Sherry Britton, Red Norvo, Maxine Sullivan, and one Gilbert J. Pincus, the improbably-named, self-appointed doorman who was once elected ""Mayor of 52nd"" talking about legends, first-nighters, all-nighters, gangsters, movie stars and the ""tuxedo and ermine crowd"": Eddie Davis, the ""Saloon Caruso"" who made 'em cry with Melancholy Baby and the infamous night that Robert Benchley spotted a herd of elephants -- ""And would you believe it, they didn't make a sound!"" -- clumping along outside 21. Shaw takes a brief, sidelong glance at the posh establishment, ""A Tiffany's Window on Society"" where Jackie and Ari prefer the upstairs dining rooms and George Humphrey (Eisenhower's Treasury Secretary) was asked to please pay cash, but he much prefers the smoky, dark dives where the Music Goes Round and Around and for a short while (1934 to 1950) ""Fifty-second Street was total friendship."" More rousing than Rudi Blesh's Combo U.S.A. (p. 80) this will bring back memories of a hot time in the old town tonight for the over-40 crowd and it might even administer a salutary musical culture shock to the denizens of Woodstock Nation."