"I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite them to cool their heels for a while, and then show up. I had no way, of course, of knowing what would happen." The deadly fumes had just killed Helen when the ermine-wrapped women and their top-hatted escorts began to flock into the building--and the gas emergency crew raced through the lobby. Nicky started his East Side Restaurant on an investment of less than $5,000. Friends helped him construct the bar. Decorations consisted of labels from whiskey bottles, losing $100 horse race tickets and the lip imprints of women patrons. The friends he made during his playboy days flocked to the new café, making it an overnight wow. And it never slowed up. Despite New York's fame for entertainment, but a handful of cabarets catering to New Yorkers present shows, which are considered attractive to only the prairie flowers. The average East Side café-goer usually doesn't even want to dance, and when he does he dances only sambas and rumbas, all other steps being passé. The purpose of dance music in fine clubs is to provide overtones for conversation. For that reason, the bands play pianissimo and all melodies are in one tempo, so you aren't conscious of the breaks. That's because New Yorkers don't go to clubs for laughs, legs or lilts--they stroll in to dine, drink and talk, to tell their patriots how pretty they are, or even sell a bill to a customer. When New Yorkers want shows, they go to theatres. Though we haven't the exact figures at hand, it's a pretty good bet that, per capita, there are more places to purchase liquor around newspaper offices than are to be found in the neighborhood of any other kind of business building. During the late great drought, the side streets in the East 40's, near Second and Third Avenues, in the vicinity of New York's two largest journals, _News_ and _Mirror_, blossomed with speakeasies, so many in fact that one three-story building contained four. After repeal, a good many of these resorts continued in business as legal saloons, catering mostly to printers, proofreaders and reporters, selling food and drink at moderate prices. Who ever heard of a newspaperman with a spare buck? Came the war's beef and butter shortage. Ex-speak proprietors with bootleg blood in their veins again heard the stirring call to battle. Word soon got around that you could always get steaks in these places. Furthermore, there was something bohemian in going to them, because you could rub shoulders with newspapermen and maybe once in awhile see a famed columnist or cartoonist. Then there were the caricatures on the walls, often drawn by needy members of the craft in payment of booze, and the sawdust on the floor. New York is a town that follows the leader. Locals began taking their out-of-town friends. Pretty soon you needed reservations and still stood in line, and dingy old saloons boasted doormen, while the journalists who had made the places couldn't wedge in.