Its shops contain priceless furs and gems, the screwiest and most expensive clothes and hats, the rarest and most unobtainable antiques, furnishings and rugs.
Its well-groomed and deftly made-up and turned-out ladies of leisure come high.
There is more wealth, more splendor, more finery gathered here than in any place on the world in any period of history.
The Sybarites were wrong-side-of-the-trackers by comparison.
A curious phenomenon of the recent war resulted in the greatest collection of treasure in the history of the world being stored in squalid Second and Third Avenue tenement houses, in the upper 40's and 50's, on the East Side.
Soon after Hitler took over, displaced merchants began pouring into America with rare gems, antiques and works of art as their only medium of exchange.
The beginning of war brought a tidal wave of similar fine works to these shores, as British and Continental art dealers moved their stocks here, out of reach of bombers.
New York, already an overcrowded commercial city, had absolutely no room to accommodate the hundreds of merchants who sprang up to sell these priceless goods. In desperation, they were forced into ground-floor stores of creaky and ratty old buildings in the slum stretches of Second and Third.
But, because this is a strange city, with contrasts in each block, and few well-defined upper class and lower class residential sections, it so happened that right around the corner from these tenements, quite often in the same block, were the apartment homes of the wealthiest folk in the nation—those most interested in buying such wares.
At the time the fabulous goods poured into the country, American millionaires began collecting jewels, art and expensive furniture as a hedge against inflation, on the theory that they always have value and are easily portable.