The days when a metropolitan black belt was picturesque and novel are gone. The decade and more when low-class and high-priced slumming in black-and-tan dives was a big-city fad has passed, too. Today, Harlem's chief attraction is the famous Savoy Ballroom. This is not a taxi dance hall. There are no hostesses or hired partners. The gents bring their own dames or pick up unaccompanied girls, who also pay their way in. Most of these are not out-and-out hustlers. In the old days the Savoy was a wow. The unrestrained dancing and the first roots of jive and boogie-woogie were beginning to appear. Both the music and the hoofing were fascinating to outsiders. But now few whites come to the doors of the Savoy, and those who do are firmly discouraged from entering. America stole the Negroes to work the land it stole from the Indians. It has not played white with either. The living, throbbing Harlem--110th Street, 116th Street, 125th Street, 135th Street, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, the west side of Fifth Avenue from 110th Street up--those highways which in their time have known throngs of sightseers, which in the heyday of Harlem hotspots housed cabarets and after-hour joints known around the world, are now beset by gangsters, streetwalkers, sluggers and muggers who often bash and slash for the mere mischief and sadism of inflamed imagination and unbridled, coddled encouragement to misbehave. On these and the dimly lit side streets which cross them property and life are rarely safe. Here white detectives dare not travel except in pairs; here rent-collectors dare not go about or enter buildings without cops to guard them; here is no place for sightseers or any strangers. Here rove the numerous gangs, members ranging in number from a dozen to several hundred and in age from almost babyhood to the "heavy workers," who include many ex-convicts. Harlem first got on the map as a place to have fun during the 1920's, when an imaginative fellow named Lee Posner, who later adopted as a middle name "Harlemania," saw its possibilities after the Chicago "black-and-tan" fad had risen to popularity. Jack Johnson, the ex-heavyweight champion, had a saloon on Seventh Avenue. This became the Cotton Club which, with all Harlem, started toward world-wide fame. Prohibition was in effect if not in force, but the snoopers passed this district up. The black part of Harlem was tucked away in the northern half of what is now the section. Its main cross street, 125th, was still lined with fine shops and branches of downtown department stores. Below that thoroughfare old New York families still lived and there were excellent apartment buildings and elegant residences. By 1930, the Negroes had everything from 110th Street up to the Polo Grounds, at 155th Street, to themselves.