STILL KICKING.(The Talk of the Town)(dancers)

Maybe you're too young to remember, but in 1942 a man named Lou Walters opened a night club called the Latin Quarter, on the corner of Broadway and Forty-eighth Street, the kind of place that no longer exists, except, in a way that doesn't quite count, in Las Vegas. Showgirls, acrobats, colored fountains, the works--"a dream," as Walters once put it, "of nights that are carefree and full of beauty." Dapper, slim, London-born, he was a man of mottoes ("Fill them full of food and take their breath away") and edicts ("Never get a suntan that leaves lines"), but his greatest talent may have been his eye for, and guardianship of, what a Latin Quarter program called "exquisite examples of perfect young American womanhood."

When Lou Walters died, in 1977, his daughter Barbara Walters did nothing to memorialize him. She was busy having a miserable time at ABC News, as the first female co-anchor of a network news program. "I was here alone," she recalled the other day. "I wouldn't have known who to call even to arrange a memorial. It was a terrible year for me."

Twenty-seven better years later, Walters was talking about the old Latin Quarter (it's an Olive Garden now) with the developer Jerry Speyer, and he suggested that she have a street named after Lou. He knew whom to call, and so two Fridays ago she found herself standing on the club's old corner, surrounded by childhood friends, household staff, TV crews, gawkers, cops, members of Mayor Bloomberg's advance team, and a dozen or so of Lou's dancers and showgirls--a few in costume, many brandishing pictures of their younger selves--to celebrate the christening of Lou Walters Way.

"Where are Winnie and Twinnie?" Walters called out.

"Here we are!" Two women appeared, sprites dressed identically in miniskirts, fish-nets, and heels. Although carbon dating might indicate otherwise, they had the legs and the gusto of newly discovered teen-agers from Absecon, New Jersey, which is what they'd been, an undisclosable number of years ago, when they met Lou Walters. They are twins, nees Eileen and Enid Wallen.

"Twinnie and Winnie need to get through," Walters said. She cleared some space, and the twins suddenly dropped into perfect, ...