Word: gomorrah
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gomorrah on the Potomac
This was the Florida of the headlines, of the columns, of salesgirls' dreams. It was the Florida which Columnist Lucius Beebe last week called "the last Gomorrah, the ultimate Babylon, the final Gnome-Rhone-Jupiter-Whirlwind, superdeluxe, extra-special, colossal, double-feature and Zombie-ridden madhouse of the world." And it was as far from the rest of Florida as Mr. Beebe was from the many-millioned humanity of his own Manhattan...
Herbert Asbury has spent the last twelve years hobnobbing with the shades of shady characters. No. 1 shammer in the past of U. S. cities, he returns from each exploration with a rich scum of superlatives. The Gangs of New York (1928) found old Manhattan a gaslit Gomorrah without peer. The Barbary Coast (1933) offered pre-earthquake San Francisco as the most vicious spot in the U. S. The French Quarter (1936) revealed New Orleans unrivaled in vice on a sinful planet. This week, with Gem of the Prairie, Mr. Asbury peers down the cesspool of Chicago, convincingly awards...
Year after the fire crime was more blatant, the police more useless than ever. From 1871 to 1894 Chicago had one active patrolman for every 20,000 residents. The Chicago Times in 1877 looked upon the rebuilt city, saw "orgies held there that . . . indicate that ancient Sodom and Gomorrah had phoenixed themselves somewhere in the neighborhood...
...Boise, Salt Lake, Portland, Cheyenne, Owosso and most of the U. S., New York, if not exactly Sodom and Gomorrah, is still the city of sin and cynicism, full of rackets. And nobody ever gave them such a bill of particulars as Thomas Dewey...