Runners for clip joints work outside the bigger bars and clubs. Policy pay-off men visit the saloons and cigar stands.
About this time, too, chorines and musicians are getting off. They swarm into the sandwich bars, delicatessens, lunch counters and all-night drugstore fountains.
The first faint streaks of dawn, breaking through the long, narrow lanes to light now almost deserted Broadway, point the way home to offside hotels and bed for make-up-streaked cuties who may dream of Hollywood, fame and fortune.
And this year, and next year, and every year, maybe five will find it.
The pages immediately preceding and following this chapter are devoted to those portions of the New York scene which, not physically on the street known as Broadway, are so intimately connected with it that in the idiom of the city they are referred to as "Broadway."
For instance, "Dream Street," the theatre section, and 52nd Street's Swing Lane are parts of the Broadway scene, though the latter is a good 300 yards removed from the Stem.
At this writing, the late Mayor LaGuardia's verboten on the old institution of burlesque still stands, but the average peasant will not be looking for it here, because his own home town probably tolerates at least one burly-Q house.
The nearest theatres dispensing that form of entertainment are in Union City, N.J., reached by Lincoln Tunnel, or 42nd Street ferry (10 minutes) and in Newark, reached by Hudson Tube (30 minutes) or Pennsylvania Railroad (15 minutes).
Though the so-called "Poor Man's Musical Comedy" is outlawed here, many of our $5 and $6 musicals and stage plays contain material that would make the most frenzied front-row burlesque patron blush. But there are still no "strippers."
One gal of our acquaintance who had made a respectable and comfortable living on the road (even in Boston) peeling in night clubs and theatres, was booked into one of our larger cafés last year.