The corner stone of
this Theatre was laid
on the 5th day of May
AD 1795
| Jacob Morton Wm Henderson Carlile Pollock | } | Commissioners |
| Lewis Hallem John Hodgkinson | } | managers |
PARK THEATRE
It was rare in the days when the Park Theatre was new, just as it is rare nowadays, for writers to be of a practical turn of mind. But in this little group, oddly enough, there was one man of business. He was the proprietor of the theatre, and although he wrote plays, and painted pictures, and wrote books, William Dunlap was a man of affairs. His home was around the corner in quiet Ann Street, which in another hundred years came to be a very noisy street indeed, crowded with venders of every sort of odds and ends that can be imagined. A block away, around another corner in Beekman Street, on the south side below Nassau, was Dunlap's home when he had given up the theatre, settled down to literature, and got to writing his important books, the American Theatre and the History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. While he was yet managing the theatre, Dunlap's favorite strolling-place was up along the parkside, past the Brick Church, and so on a few steps across Nassau Street to where Spruce Street has its start. On any pleasant afternoon he could be found standing on that corner, for a time at least, before the door of Martling's Tavern, where the Tammany Society had its first home. Looking at that first Wigwam after this lapse of time, it seems picturesque enough, and it must in truth have been so, for the enemies of the Tammany Society were in the habit of referring to it as the "Pig-pen." A frame building, low, rough, and unpainted, with a bar-room at one end, a kitchen at the other, and between the two a "long room," some steps lower than the general floor,—that was Martling's.
THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM, CORNER NASSAU AND SPRUCE STREETS.
In the tap-room at Martling's, after an evening in which the untimely death of George Frederick Cooke had been discussed, Dunlap announced his intention of writing a life of his actor-friend, who then lay in a new-made grave in St. Paul's Churchyard. The book was written, and though few remember the volume now, it was widely read and served to keep alive the actor's memory. Since that time the grave has been cared for, and the marble tombstone, later erected by Edmund Kean, still stands amid the bushes close by the entrance door of the Chapel.
It was in the year 1810 that Cooke played at the Park Theatre, the first foreign "star" to come to the city and to attract the townspeople in such wise that they almost mobbed the playhouse in their efforts to see him. It was this same Cooke, who, hearing many speak of a young actor who had played there the year before, said, "I should have liked to have seen this Payne of yours." Cooke saw him the next year, and they appeared together in this same Park Theatre, Payne playing Edgar to Cooke's Lear.
The name of John Howard Payne did not then have the significance that it came to have later. For he was known only as a youth who had acted Norval in the tragedy of Douglas with such fiery earnestness as to be proclaimed the "Young American Roscius." Who could have foreseen that adventurous "boy actor" grown to manhood, and writing a song that was to live and be known the world over by reason of its appeal to all hearts?