Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

Dorothy Parker, news item.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music century. Episode 243, the Algonquin Roundtable.

I want to talk about two related subjects today, American letters and the city of New York.

Perhaps they're not all that closely related, but I will note that by the jazz age, New York

was emerging as the national capital of the book and magazine publishing industries.

Of course, by this time, New York had also become the world's most important financial center,

see, episode 240, the center of the broadcasting industry, episode 237, the center of musical theater,

we'll get to that next week, and the center of opposition to prohibition, episode 232.

It was America's most important port, and the center of the U.S. garment industry as well, though I don't think I've mentioned either of those things yet.

It had been the center of the U.S. motion picture industry, but by 1920, that had largely moved to

southern California to take advantage of the sunny weather.

Still, that's a lot of things to be the center of. And I think one of the more interesting and

neglected stories of the early 20th century is the rise of New York City to the stature of a

world city, on par with any other city in the world, even the grand old ones of Europe like Paris or

London. All the more remarkable, given that New York is not a national capital like Paris or London,

New York is not even the capital of the state of New York. New York City, as we know it today, only came into being in 1898, with the consolidation

of New York County, which was then Manhattan and the Bronx, plus the city of Brooklyn, and Staten

Island and Queens, which were then mostly rural. At that time, the new city had a population of about

3.4 million. That number would double by 1930. From 1900 to 1924, when the Immigration Act

passed, Episode 230, immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe accounted for most of this increase.

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