In this eastward move to Lexington is a less glamorous aspect, as the streetwalkers followed in the wake of lonely men. You can see them, afternoon or evening, on the east side of Lexington, from 42nd Street to 57th—swinging big purses and whatever else they have to swing.
Whereas the $5 sisters in sin have inherited Broadway, these are $10-and-upwards snobs.
Another malodorous phase, which now seems the complementary concomitant of a big-town highway, is the horde of homosexuals who adopted it as their midway.
They parade with mincing steps in pairs and trios up both sides of the avenue. Some are blondined, some act "masculine," Negroes mix with white ones, all on the make for strangers.
Gotham's hard-boiled and efficient, but sadly under-manned, police force does its best to keep these misconceived creatures off the streets and out of bars, but there are so many drinking places on the avenue—in some cases ten to a block—it is impossible to make more than token arrests, of the most flagrant cases.
The fame of Third Avenue, a block to the east, is so frequently sung these days in fiction and the movies, that it is not necessary to tell you much about it, except that the so-called sophisticated set has taken over its dingy, old-fashioned saloons under the "El" with the homey Irish names, and driven their former patrons, calloused sons of the pick and hod, far away and muttering.
Here it is considered ultrasmart to drink at a bar where a self-respecting dock-walloper can't afford the new prices.
Here, drinking shoulder to shoulder, are jaded sons and daughters of the rich, bohemians, musical comedy favorites, artists and newspapermen, fairies and Lesbians. There's no room for a plain, honest Irishman.
Things are moving fast on the East Side. Between the time when this tome was started and its last words were written, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., "benefacted" the United Nations into abandoning the original dream of a bucolic world capital to be at home in a series of skyscrapers being designed for the East River front, between 42nd and 48th Streets.
Both authors of this book live within a block of the development. As they work on this paragraph they can see architectural monstrosities being erected on the former site of slaughterhouses, junk-lots and tenements.