Between these two levels of honest if Middlesex entertainment are the atmospheric places gotten up to look very Left Bank, with eerie lighting and futuristic painting to impress the pabulum.
"Occasional" prostitutes work some of the bars, and bobby soxers flirt at Washington Square. But most of the pick-ups in Greenwich Village are those between fags and between skirted women-hunters.
Since the working artistic colony forsook the Village and turned it over to congenital abnormals, the rest of the town seldom, if ever, is invited to Village affairs. All the excitement downtown now is behind closed and locked doors.
Drugs and depravities are prevalent at some of these purple parties, which often turn into unspeakable saturnalias within draped walls, in musk-heavy air.
An uncommonly large percentage of the nation's runaway girls are found in the Village, living with men or women. Recently there has been some Negro penetration. There is no racial discrimination in parts of the section.
In one of the Village's most famed cabarets, Café Society Downtown, the younger boys and girls of both races mingle openly.
This financially successful club had an uptown branch in the swank East Side, where customers also "hopped across the (race) fence." It was shuttered after the president of the corporation owning both clubs turned out to be the wife of America's "No. 2 Communist"—Leon Josephson, convicted of contempt of Congress. The village club is still operated but by new owners—not Red.
But shrewd traders in nature's mishaps profit by the surreptitious reputation of this off-the-highway sector.
They have runners at the clubs and around the town, whispering to likely cash-and-carry strays—women included—of Sodom and Gomorrah on Manhattan, where, for a stiff price, they can behold forbidden fruit.
When a fish is hooked, a quick 'phone call assembles the male magdalens and the female monstrosities. When the visitor arrives, the revel is in swing, to seem spontaneous. What goes on then is pretty much the real thing. Guests are rarely invited to any indulgence—they are spectators.