Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 2, Number 46, DeMotte, Jasper County, 30 March 1933 — Broadway Nears End of 7 Old Glory and Glamour [ARTICLE]

Broadway Nears End of Old Glory and Glamour

Gyps and Fakers Move In on Great White Way. New York.--Broadway, they say, is finished--through! Once the fairest, brightest street in all the world of happy make-believe, the thoroughfare is fast losing its individuality in a riot of cheap movie “palaces,” fake auction sales, “physical culture parlors," hot dog and orangeade stands, and a hundred and one variations of the thimble rigger’s art run out of Coney island as too blatantly cheap for further sufferance. Sidewalk fakers abound on every block. At times the interest of the moron groups they attract is such as to block the passageway and force pedestrians to the roadway. Barkers lie in wait in front of fly by night “fire” and “bankruptcy sacrifice” sale joints ready to pull in the unwary. Little shops, flaunting show window displays of the latest in lady’s undies, nestle in between. A shooting galllery adds its clatter to the motley din. Appeals to the Morons. Around the corner on Forty-second street a flea circus is sandwiched in a dime a dance “palace” and a high pressure shoe repair shop. Cheap, tawdry, vulgar, rundown at the heels, with no self-respect and “no idea of what self-respect means” --that’s the Broadway of today to untold thousands who loved the Broadway of yesterday. The degeneration of the famous thoroughfare, or rather that midtown stretch of it popularly associated with bright lights and broken hearts, has become the subject of much lamentation by the “dead guard” of the town’s citizenry here of late. Outside the Metropolitan opera house, the Empire theater and one hotel there’s hardly a resort of the old Broadway left between Madison square and Fifty-third street--where the ugly “L” straddles across the sidewalks and seems to cut off further progress to the north. The best theaters of the so-called “White Light” district now skulk along the side streets as if ashamed of the street their predecessors made famous. They were driven off by high rents, of course, but the effect is the same. Many of those now remaining are boarded up--for want of patronage. Others house nondescript movies. On the whole street there is not to be found a single restaurant which oldtimers would class with Rector’s, Churchill’s, Shanley’s, the Hofbrau, or Brown’s Chop house. The larger cinema palaces--which currently form the thoroughfare’s chief “theatrical” attractions--have been compelled to reduce prices generally to offset the depression and the competition of free medicine shows. They Still Love It. There is a tradition that Charles Frohman, walking up Broadway from his office in the Empire one day, noticed a sign proclaiming a new bake shop or some establishment equally unpretentious, and was moved to let out a snort of indignation that could

be heard a block away. What would the producer, proud of his Broadway, think of the street today, old-timers who knew him often wonder. And yet there are those who still love the old one-time cow trail for all its shabbiness and lack of spirit. Those convinced that Broadway Is doomed are already casting about for a possible successor to the city’s erstwhile “parade street.” Some think that Radio City, now growing up along Fifth avenue a few blocks below Central park, may in time get to be the city’s new famous “Gay White Way.”

There has been considerable talk of late of the Metropolitan opera, now in dire financial distress, moving to the magic Rockefeller development and trying for a new start, although the opera’s "old guard” has a conniption fit every time the suggestion is offered. If opera should move over--and the development was originally planned with a view to making opera its heart and center--it is believed the best in theaters might follow. Others think Fifth avenue, which so far has stood adamant against encroachment by the theaters might eventually capitulate and sacrifice some of its dignity to the town’s crying need for a new amusement center. Stranger things have happened. Wherever it is to be, though, the town must have a new land of makbelieve. It is written--so say those in the know.