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I. & Y. cigar store at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue and genial host to a free-floating late-night salon. Liebling delicately pumped Izzy and his patrons full of the hot air of mock-epic. He wrote, “Most of his evening guests—their purchases are so infrequent that it would be misleading to call them customers—wear white felt hats and overcoats of a style known to them as English drape. . . . Short men peer up from beneath the wideflung shoulders of these coats as if they had been lowered into the garment on a rope and were now trying to climb out.” (Is it any wonder that Liebling laughed out loud as he typed?) Each of these men, he wrote, “fosters a little legend of lost affluence; fifty grand dropped on the races in one day, twenty grand blown on a doll in a brief sojourn at Atlantic City. Never to have been in the chips marks one as a punk or a smalltimer. It precludes conversation in big figures.”

Liebling was the bard of Times Square in its era of picturesque impoverishment. He wrote a long profile of Hymie Katz, a local virtuoso of the con who ran a racetrack “tipping service” in which he scammed out-of-town ministers and doctors. Hymie was a hero at the I. & Y. “Hymie is a man who knows how to get a dollar,” said the habitués. Hymie had opened twenty-five nightclubs in his day, and took a view of them which precluded all forms of sentiment. “What is a nightclub?” he sneers. “Spit and toilet paper.” Hymie explained how it was possible to open a nightclub with nothing more than a loan of $50, which was the figure required to retain a lawyer in order to draw up a lease for one of the innumerable basement rooms in the West Forties usable for nothing save a nightspot. Hymie would then flourish the lease, and a great deal of promotional and by no means credible nonsense, before a hat-check concessionaire who would front $3,000; use these funds to lease cut-rate supplies from a nightclub equipment supplier, and to buy liquor; and then sell jobs to waiters— $400 for the captain, $200 for the headwaiters, $50 for the rest of the staff. “Waiters like to work for Hymie because he lets them take whatever they can get,” Liebling writes. He quotes Hymie as saying, “Most of the stealing they do is from the customers, so what do I care?”

Liebling was a famous gourmet and gourmand, but he rarely wrote about New York’s fine restaurants; likewise, he considered the great clubs of the day unworthy journalistic material. He referred to the Times Square of the late Depression as a “famine area”; and it was life under famine conditions that stirred his imagination and provoked his humor. Liebling’s masterpiece in this spirit of Daumier was a series of articles about the Jollity Building, a fictional office building formed out of several real-life low-rises on Broadway in the upper Forties. Liebling guides the reader through the many layers of the Jollity with the rapt attention of Dante surveying the Inferno; as his Virgil he recruits the Jollity’s rental agent, Marty, “a thin, sallow man of 40 whose complexion has been compared, a little unfairly, to that of a dead robin.” On the ground floor of the Jollity are eight phone booths manned by what Marty calls the “Telephone Booth Indians,” “because in their lives the telephone booth furnishes sustenance as well as shelter, as the buffalo did for the Arapahoe and the Sioux.” A Telephone Booth Indian who puts a few dollars together through, say, successful bookmaking may graduate to one of the tiny cubicles on the third floor, in which case he becomes a “heel.” And if a heel can put together a down payment on an unfurnished office upstairs—say, through booking a few animals acts at a nightclub—he may graduate to the rarefied status of “tenant,” though it tends to be a very transitory state. “A dispossessed tenant often reappears in the Jollity Building as an Indian,” Liebling writes. “It is a life cycle.”

A quarter of a century earlier, Julian Street, the Liebling of his day, had recoiled in disgust from the hedonism and heedlessness of Broadway. A decade after that, Damon Runyon hadn’t