whore to good church-going lady, from bow-tie businessman to toothless derelict. Raucous music bled from bars and clubs, and the smell of fried food wafted. Laughter, high and hearty, cut across traffic sounds, but so did angry yells. This was that big multi-colored neon-washed canvas called Harlem—110th, 116th, 125th, and 135th Streets, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, the west side of Fifth Avenue from 110th up— bustling, pulsing, threatening, vulgar, poetic. Time was when a downtown “ofay” like me came up here to dig the jazz at Birdland or maybe dance at the Savoy. That was back when side-street after-hours joints flourished by ignoring New York’s candy-ass legal closing time of four A.M. If I were so inclined, I could tell you of wild nights that ended with me and a date stumbling out of a smoke-filled basement hideaway into unforgiving sunlight. No more. In this small section of the city, a population of 700,000, largely colored, made up what one Broadway columnist called “a concentration camp surrounded by the barbed-wire fence of ironclad prejudice.”
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