It was always my opinion that Sheldon Harnick's lyrics for the song "Little Tin Box" in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. "Fiorello," was merely an example of an artist using reality as a starting point for inventiveness and stretching a point. Let's call it artistic license.

I stand corrected.

Herbert Mitgang's splendid book, ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK (Free Press) sheds light, among other things, on the tin boxes of political testimony that surfaced during the inquisition of New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker.

Indeed, as in the Harnick-Jerry Boch song, Walker's cronies explained away excessive amounts of cold cash, which was usually located in tin boxes. Transcripts from the hearings reads like the libretto for a musical comedy.

Gentlemen Jimmy Walker - colorful, shameless, a charmer and a scoundrel - was the man in City Hall during prohibition. Everything about the person and his politics reflected the times - the jazz age, speakeasies and between World Wars escapism. But the days of excess and frivolity ran head-on into the world-wide economic depression of 1929. What once had appeared to be an enviable, hedonistic political life was suddenly viewed in some quarters as excessive and criminal.

Franklin Roosevelt was New York's Governor, with aspirations to be the President of the United States, succeeding the faltering Herbert Hoover, whose administration was identified with the big crash. The abuse of Tammany Hall had to be confronted if FDR was to be viewed a forceful leader during troubled times.

Walker, and the traditional City Hall looseness, which, in fact, was absorbed with wholesale criminality, was an anathema to FDR and his tribe of counselors.

Herbert Mitgang, a former New York Times journalist, has given us a first-rate re-telling of this political crossroad, which, had it not been resolved, might well have altered the direction of this nation. Roosevelt's historic presidency was never assured, for the spirited Jimmy Walker was a political road-block in 1932.

It is not possible to read Mitgang's ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK without looking for contemporary similarities. For corruption, ambition and political machinations linger.

No one would accuse the current Mayor of being pleasure-seeking or a collector of unexplained revenue. Power, rather than money, seems to motivate the current inhabitant of City Hall.

Jimmy Walker was an apologist for his loyalists, dubious as their behavior and credibility might have been. The bumbling Police Commissioner of today, Howard Safir, is a Giuliani loyalist, and comes to mind as you read this New York City history.

Walker moved out on his wife and was always in the company of a Broadway musical comedy performer, Betty Compton, whom he eventually married once he was out of politics. Christine Lategano will never be mistaken for a showgirl, but while the Mayor's wife, Donna Hanover, is more likely to be found on milk cartons than on her husband's arm, Ms Lategano was ubiquitous until advisors moved her out of City Hall into a pay-off position. Thus, the reality of a Senate campaign.

There is something quite lively and contemporary in Herbert Mitgang's ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK, which could be sub-titled "Everything Old Is New Again." In fact, the subtitle is "Jimmy Walker, FDR and The Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age."

Mitgang's book is a must for political groupies, lovers of New York City history and anyone who likes a good story.