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 ...