This is Gotham's Main Drag; strangely, save for the milling crowds and the blinding Mazdas, it has not now and has not had for the past decade those features which are universally supposed by all the people "in the know" all over the world, except in New York, to be on Broadway. At this writing, on the whole "street," there are but two theatres permanently devoted to the legitimate stage. But there are more than 30 legitimate theatres in New York. All, except the aforementioned and a handful on parallel avenues, are located east and west of Broadway, in narrow side streets in the 40's and 50's. Of about 1,500 licensed cabarets in New York, there are at this writing but four with entrances on the Stem. If, from seeing the film of that name, you thought 42nd Street--where it crosses Broadway--is the center of Manhattan's mad gaiety, you have much to learn. That thoroughfare, once the home of a dozen proud theatres including the New Amsterdam of red plush and wonderful memories, is now devoted exclusively to "grind" movie houses, penny arcades, flea circuses, army and navy goods stores, orange juice stands and frowzy but friendly dames. Broadway teems with dime dance halls, open air hot dog counters, photo and shooting galleries, souvenir and novelty holes-in-the-wall. It is the honky-tonk that was Coney Island, the crossroads carnival. But, strangely enough, in the daytime, when the bright lights that draw the rubes are off and Broadway's sidewalks are comparatively free, it reverts to its old estate as the home and capital of the entertainment world. For here, and nearby, are the offices of the theatrical producers, the agents who sell the acts, the dance studios where embryo chorus fillies learn to hoof; the costumers and the hooters, the scenic artists and designers--and Tin Pan Alley. * * * * * When Mike Jacobs moved his handmade teeth and his principality of pugs a few feet west to Madison Square Garden, he broke up a mongrel marriage of sock and song, which had long been the Brill Building. An old-fashioned, ten-story structure, smoke-grimed, with creaking and groaning elevators, it had become the stronghold and nerve center of two giant industries. Prize-fighters, the tycoons and tramps who manage them, rubbers, sponge-carriers, trainers and the motley mob which gathers around the boxing racket rubbed against music publishers, composers, lyric writers, piano players, arrangers and the others of the equally heterogeneous individuals engaged in creating and selling the songs of the world. On the main floor, facing Broadway, are two cafés--the Turf, hangout for musicians, and Dempsey's, rendezvous of pugs. Across the street, on the 49th Street side, is the Forrest Hotel, long the secondary concentration headquarters for the boys of Jacobs' Beach. Up the street and across Eighth Avenue is the Garden, the Taj Mahal of the biff business.