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. Meanwhile, most of its permanent secretariat has taken up living quarters near the world capital-to-be, adding much "atmosphere." This is a world within a world, with Arabs, Chinese, Haitians, Liberians, Hindus, Siamese--in native dress--mixing in hotel lobbies, restaurants, shops and on the streets, with French, Latin-Americans, Scandinavians, British--and the everyday motley of any New York thoroughfare. 7. WE NEVER GO THERE ANY MORE No, we don't. The Bowery, once the storied sinner's paradise, is dead and will not come back. Its glories belong to the past, when New York was young, and, grandpa said, gay. The wide street under the Third Avenue "El" (soon to be torn down) has been turned over to lofts and salesrooms. Sandwiched between them are hockshops and the flophouses where homeless hobos rent a clean bed for two bits; and cheap restaurants offer full meals, even in these inflationary days, for the same sum; and filthy bars sell bottled "smoke" at a dime (and an ulcer) a drink. The only memory of a lurid career of wine, women, song, all-night hubbub and singing waiters (including Irving Berlin) is a lone cabaret: Sammy's Bowery Follies, purposely dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, with lusty, noisy, nostalgic entertainment of the '80's. In the old days, however, the lines of the song--"The Bowery, the Bowery, they do such things...." meant just what they said. Whereas at one time this zigzag lane had been the center of middle-class night life, with such music halls as Tony Pastor's, and beer gardens, concert saloons and fairly respectable dance halls where the modest toiler and his girl could spend an evening at moderate cost, in its later days the Bowery became the focal point for the worst dives in the city. Here were low, mean resorts, beside which the dumps of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, New Orleans' Basin Street, and Chicago's 22nd Street were old ladies' homes.