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Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway
Gangsters and Gold Diggers Old New York the Jazz Age and the Birth of Broadway Author:Jerome Charyn Once upon a time Broadway was just another street. In Gangsters & Gold Diggers, Jerome Charyn transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American lifethe Roaring Twentieswhen Broadway suddenly exploded into Broadway. Damon Runyon was the first chronicler of the Big Street. He created the myth of Broadway, invented the "s... more »language." The Ziegfeld Follies became its most important institutioneverybody, including Zelda Fitzgerald, wanted to be a Follies Girl. Then came Lindys, a delicatessen and hangout for actors, bootleggers, singers, hustlers, chorus girls, and celebrities. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make Broadway the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Louise Brooks to William Randolph Hearst, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein and the Gatsby-like gangster Owen Madden, and many more. In lively, cinematic prose, Charyn captures Broadways vagabondage, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. He brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble period in New York history to lifeconjuring an intoxicating portrait of Jazz Age excess by examining the denizens of that greatest of all "staggering machine[s] of desire," the street known as Broadway.« less