There are, even in mid-July, two score legitimate theatres offering the great hits, for shows that survive into this period are all lusty and hardy. Within easy drives are locality playhouses with several other sturdy attractions, and "straw hat" try-out and revival productions. You have a wide choice of concerts, indoor and outdoor opera, a dozen swanky or swift cabarets and a hundred minor ones. There are three big-league baseball teams within a $1.50 taxi hop from Times Square, always one and often two at home, all exciting, usually at least one out in front. There are a half-dozen boxing shows each week, al-fresco or, like most of the burg, air-conditioned. If you would attend churches, we have some of the finest and most famous cathedrals of all faiths and creeds. Half the saloons are equipped with television, and for the price of a beer you can see and hear leading sports and other biff-bang affairs as they are proceeding. There are eating places from sub-sub basements to the 85th floor, and from automats where you slip in a coin and get back a hot hamburger to the Stork and El Morocco, where you won't be allowed in, which is just as well for your bank roll. There are sidewalk cafés, acres of penthouse-terrace restaurants, menus and service and customs of all nations, including the Scandinavian and not excluding the Moravian. And, summer or any season, you have a feeling that the world is spinning about you--and whole little worlds, not geared just for tourists--concentrations of all nations and segments of them--even a White Russian colony. Taxis galore drop the flag at 20 cents. The average haul is a half-buck. Everything is big time. There's an air and a snap and a tang to Manhattan that is generated by championship rather than by huge mobilizations of people and of money. Brooklyn is far more populous; Chicago has more than twice the population. But there is a zip and a zing here, a supercivilized, metropolitan method of behavior, unique and indescribable. Manhattan has a nonchalance about the world and itself known nowhere else. The newspapers do not bother to publish the borough's own vital statistics. One can be born, married, have children, die and be buried, entirely unnoticed. At the other extreme, nobody is important. Celebrities get a passing glance, maybe, and not always that. Bank statements list billions in deposits and almost no one reads them. Ships from every port come and go and get a line for the record, in a few gazettes. Yet there is civic pride, there are organized boosters; Rotarians and Kiwanians and Lions meet and slap backs and call one another Pete and Baldy.