Since even "smoke" has risen in price, the 'bos now buy a pint of domestic wine, 12 per cent alcohol, and mix it with a pint of grain alcohol, and the result is Olympian.
The rubberneck buses are running again, and the spielers sing the sagas of the old cowpath. But they sound hollow. The bum has gone the way of the bison, a vanishing American.
Dark and dead, like the old Bowery, is Satan's Circus, more generally known as "The Tenderloin."
In less trammeled times, it epitomized wicked all-night life and commercial carnalities too strong even for some gizzards of the period.
Broadway, which then as now, was the show window, bisected it diagonally, but Sixth Avenue was its actual main street.
That long, wide slit (now called The Avenue of the Americas), scheduled by its property owners to be the future rialto, was lined with brothels and saloons from 14th Street to 40th. The lustier aspects of the old Bowery had moved to Sixth Avenue and its environs, and here were hatched the major crimes of the era. The infamous Haymarket dance hall and flesh-market stood at 30th Street.
This section, containing the worst dives in the city and the best theatres, dining places and hotels, was lush picking.
According to the historians it got its name when Police Captain Alexander Williams was put in command of the precinct.
"I been transferred," he is reported to have said. "I never had nothin' but chuck steak. Now I'm gonna get some tenderloin."
The irresistible upward movement that characterizes New York carried the old Tenderloin above 42nd Street, and for many years there was more gambling, vice and felony in the streets between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, in the 40's and 50's, than in any comparable area in the world.
This came to an end--suddenly--after 1912, following the notorious Becker-Rosenthal case, when Police Lieutenant Charles Becker was executed in Sing Sing for complicity in the murder of Herman Rosenthal, a big-time gambler who squealed to District Attorney Whitman about the tie-up between police and the crime syndicate.
Madison Square Garden, where you see the fights, circus and hockey games, is nowhere near Madison Square and is not a garden.
Madison Square is at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. The present-day Garden is at 50th and Eighth. A new and larger one is to be built at Columbus Circle.
