Art: Make Mine Manhattan

No. 1 Union Square, New York City, looks like a run-down office building. For Painter Reginald Marsh it is an ivory tower, with its feet planted firmly in the Manhattan market place. Marsh, a retiring 50-year-old chunk of a man, spends whole days at his studio window on the top floor, surveys the square below through a telescope. The caved-in bums, bundled up news vendors and bumptious, pneumatic-looking shopgirls that catch his eye are swiftly translated into notebook sketches and filed away in a steel cabinet.

Packed in with them, cheek by jowl, are the burlesque queens, taxi-dance-hall hostesses and Coney Island...

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