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. 6. EAST SIDE, BEST SIDE 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." The past decade has seen most of midtown New York's night life--the publicized part, anyway--transferred there. Here are the places where Gotham's cabaret-wise go; the big glitter and glamor joints on the West Side are for visitors only. However, when the oaf searches for the so-called entertainment district on the East Side, he will not find it. All the patronage is taxi trade--or drop-ins--from the huge neighboring hotels and apartment buildings. There is no East Side Bright Belt. The East Side is where you find such snooty places as the Stork Club, El Morocco and the Colony; such gay spots as the Copacabana and the Versailles. Many of the world's finest and most celebrated dining spots snuggle in the section; there are so many, it would be impossible to give even a sketchy list here. One--Chambord--surrounded by tenements and low groggeries, where pheasant breast sells for $16, is regarded the costliest on earth. Once the term "East Side" connoted poverty. It signified endless miles of filthy streets, lined with rickety tenements in which millions of Europe's dispossessed struggled for a foothold in the land of promise. Of that East Side--the lower East Side--much remains. Our present excursus deals only with a wonderland of wealth, a unique Mecca of marble and steel with all the world's riches, that lies above 42nd Street, a creation of recent times--a development in the wake of the electrification of the New York Central tracks, and the opening up of miles of priceless and convenient midtown property to exploitation for residences and office buildings. This East Side cannot be described in one sentence, nor in one book. It is a Manhattan mélange of money and beauty, prodigality and banality, with haunts and hangouts of every description, from pizzerias for truck-drivers to regal retreats.