No visitor can catch "the Voice of the City." O. Henry, who called it that, didn't. Nor can readers of the beloved tales of Damon Runyon. Damon was our friend and we admired him profoundly, because he could write fascinatingly, almost entirely from imagination, not from photographic impression. Characters like those he concocted never lived, around "Mindy's" or anywhere else. He laughingly said so, himself. New Yorkers compose plays about New York and any resemblance to the living or dead is carelessness. In truth, Manhattan--which for most fact or fiction material is New York--cannot be transcribed or translated. It isn't even itself! There are so many foreign and unrelated elements undergoing a steady, invisible process of blending; the picture changes slowly, yet ceaselessly; and no human camera is fast enough to catch it in the static focus of repose. No one has portrayed New York as Dickens did London or Sue did Paris. Those who tried have had to sectionalize it; none could wrap it all up into a comprehensive entity. If they grasped the financial or theatrical or criminal or social or artistic or political aspect of the city's life, they could not extend the panorama into the human, the domestic, the personal phases. If they looked on high they were so spellbound they could not turn to grope into the subterranean. Those who realized the astounding things and people could not vitalize the humble, the ordinary, the devout and industrious bread-and-butter brothers and sisters. Manhattan doesn't materialize to even those who spend their lives in it. A thrilling, throbbing mystery! 2. THE CANYON _Damon Runyon_ immortalized 47th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, as "Dream Street." Jack Lait dramatized it as "The Canyon." It is a shabby, dismal block. Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horse-players, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts (male and female), drunks, stage widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game steerers and bottom-dealers. On fine days you see them on the sidewalks. Old women with grotesque young get-ups and peroxided hair, parading their pooches; bewhiskered, unkempt men on the church steps, passionately studying racing scratch sheets; apoplectic dipsomaniacs airing out cheap jags; actors whose world has gone by, talking of starring roles of the past--and next season. Here is the stage door of the once fabulous Palace, mecca for all vaudevillians. The theatre, pride of its builder, Martin Beck, was the hub of the old Keith-Orpheum Circuit, and on its stage appeared, for a quarter of a century, the top names of show business. Around the corner is Broadway and the Great White Way. A block to the east is prosperous Fifth Avenue, glistening in mink and pearls. But life on Dream Street goes on, oblivious of these other worlds.