The Waterbury Democrat., 1933-07-22
PIN III ! II NEW II { M YORK
ny PAUL HARRISON

New York = Most of Broad
 way's celebrities had amazingly in- auspicious beginnings. Jonn Golden. for instance, one or tne most successful producers, once yvaa A bricklayer and even was Al member of a construction gang on a theater in which some or ms plays later appeared. Ana George Gershwin, who was Dorn George Brushkin In Brooklyn, used ! to be a half-starved song plugger in Tin Pan Alley. His next Jop Was in a vaudeville act In A cnesp movie house, and he lasted exactiy one performance.
 It was only 8 few short years ago that Ethel Norman was Iiall- ing @ typewriter in a realty oiIice. And now she's starring in rake 2 Chance" the musical hit that nas
 moved to Chicago. samuel hotn
 afel. now known as Roxy is an
 ex- bartender and former marime. Rosa PonseIle vaulted from the
 vaudeville stage to the Metropoh- tan Opera Company. And Mae
 West was a vaudeville acrobat. George S. Kaufman. after being fired from at least half the news papers of New York and Wash ington. now has become the fore most director-playwright in Amerl- can theater. .,.
 l Eddie Elkins, the orchestra | leader, graduated from a dental college; Fred Waring took a de- gree in architecture; and George
 Kelly. the playwright, once was civil engineer. .. Constance Ben nett used to be a rialto chorus giri.
 Arthur Hammerstein longed to be a prizefighter, and, as sparring partner, was clouted
 around by most of the topnotchers of that day.
 Religious New York
 Little notes on the big town: It has more than 200 theaters and movie houses, with about third of them dark at present; 200 night clubs. most of which are los- ing money; 400 public dance halls snecializing in the sucker trade;
 ana more speakeasies (often esti-
 mated at oyer 30,000) than the
 mere 57 Federal enforcement men
 can shake a stick at ;. New York
 Is more religious. though, than than
 you'd think, for 1t has 2,ooo churches of every sect and denomi- |nation including Buddhist and MO, Il ,lhammedan, and they have a totai
 membership of well over mll- Ilion.
 l More than a third of the people here are foreign-born, and it's dlI-
 ficult to find a native New Yorker. It has more Italians than Rome more Irish thon Dublin, more Ger-
 mans than Bremen, and more m.
 dians than Tishomingo, Okla: it
 contains one-tenth of all the Jews
 in the world; and there are exact fly 11.314 Cohens in the BrooKiyn
 telephone directory alone. New Work is a center of higher educa- tion: as a matter of fact, one or lits college campuses Is on the forty-second floor of the Wool worth building. ...
 | The town dotes on its 140 pub ic nnonI1ments and statues, which if laid end to end, would probably look more astonishing than they do at present. ;. Real estate here is worth ss,boo. 100000. which doesn't mean that taxes are col Iected on any such amount. A l, new business starts up approxi- mately every fourteen minutes and another goes broke almost as often. Every 52 seconds a pas senger train pulls in to discharge
 part of the 100000 visitors that ar . rive every day, at least half or whom know more about New Xork i, than do New Yorkrs. =.
 The traffic problem keeps every body on the jump, although the , time spent by pedestrians waiting i. to cross Fifth avenue at Forty second street totals 100000 days a year. Somebody is born every , eight minutes. and there's g we'd ding every fourteen minutes: Each , hour and fifteen minutes, though. somebody applies for a divorce or hops off for Reno.