Beneath the banks, chain pharmacies, and office towers of Midtown Manhattan lies the graveyard of a cultural revolution. This episode takes a walking tour of 52nd Street, a 1.9-mile stretch running from the West Side Highway to a dead-end bluff over the FDR Drive, and explains how the end of Prohibition in 1933 shifted New York’s jazz epicenter from Harlem to a row of converted brownstone basements conveniently close to Broadway theaters and the CBS radio studios.

The conversation revisits clubs like the Onyx, the Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan’s, Kelly’s Stable, and the Hickory House, where Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker played after-hours sets that incubated bebop and were broadcast nationally by Symphony Sid. It then follows the street’s later mutations: the Cheetah Club at 310 West 52nd that helped push salsa into the mainstream, the 1979 lunch at La Rotisserie Francaise where Daniel Okrent invented Rotisserie League baseball, the Seagram Building and CBS Black Rock, the vanished Vanderbilt mansion, the hidden 6 1/2 Avenue, and the secluded Campanile where Greta Garbo and John Lennon lived.

• Why Broadway pit musicians and radio players treated 52nd Street as the ultimate industry after-party
• How the Onyx moved to at least four addresses on the same street
• Why bebop’s blistering tempos and flatted fifths acted as a musical gatekeeper on the bandstand
• How early fantasy baseball players tracked box scores by hand from the daily newspaper
• Why the Seagram Building’s public plaza changed New York zoning law