One square to the south is Radio City, and a block north is dignified, restricted 53d Street.
Those who own the real estate at the west end of Swing Lane have a feeling they are directly in the path of Manifest Destiny. Their property has possibilities of incalculable wealth. The golden lightning is scheduled to strike so soon, the freeholders do nothing toward improving the brownstones which still remain, but rent them out at high rates to night clubs on the ground floor while the upper stories cater to transient roomers or have been reconverted into small kitchenette apartments.
In this little valley less than a hundred yards long is a unique concentration of vice and hokum. Here are deadfalls designed especially to attract the tourists with promises of naughty displays of undraped female cuticle; yet, by the time the customer has paid his tab, he's seen nothing more revealing than a fat female supposed to be "nude," whose generously proportioned panties and bra (which always remain on) are constructed of material as thick as carpeting, and as opaque.
Yet other places, next door, cater to dope addicts, perverts and streetwalkers, while many of the furnished rooms over some of the most respectable places are frequently employed as assignation houses, or provide drop-ins for youths and young girls seeking places in which to engage in mad marijuana revels.
Fifty-Second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, has long been the poor sister of Swing Lane, for most of its length a dreary, dingy path of parking lots, garages, closed stables, and a few saloons, though right near Seventh Avenue there are a few first-class restaurants.
Another 52nd Street phenomenon is an influx of Chinese restaurants in the past few years. There are five in a half block off Broadway, and more than a dozen others within a block radius. But more about the uptown Orient in a later chapter.
The lines of the Kipling poem have been rewritten. Here we say—"Take me somewhere east of Fifth, where a man can rinse a thirst."