“If Chicago has anything resembling a bohemian section,” wrote Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose other emissions included “New York: Confidential!,” “it is the Near North Side. Bughouse Square attracts the nuts and the exhibitionists. The made-over flats and the remolded mansions harbor all that is left of Chicago’s artistic and literacy coldly. What was once on the way to being the center of a new school of civilized culture has dwindled to a pocket edition of the remains of atmosphere in New York’s Greenwich Village, with candlelighted tea-shops, a few sawdust-strew saloons where the avante garde reads effusions of its confusions to other would-bes, and the pet drinks are grappo and vino rouge.” The pages rampage with melodrama and the shrieking hysteria of the moment and Lait and Mortimer always protesteth too much: “Such habituals always draw the distorted and the perverted and that mélange of middle-sex jobs which nature started but never finished. As a blind for allowing more serious toleration, the police swoop down now and again on the pathological misfits, but they soon return.” (Ray Pride)
