The Title Heading Has Remained Unchanged for Fifty Years.
THE HOME OF “THE SUN” FROM 1868 TO 1915
The Famous Old Building at Nassau and Spruce Streets.
The Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, housed Italian opera. The Théâtre Français, also on Fourteenth Street, but near Sixth Avenue, was the original home in this country of opera bouffe. Opera burlesque prevailed at the Fifth Avenue Opera House, on West Twenty-Fourth Street. The Olympic, on Broadway near Houston, had been built for Laura Keene; it was there that Edward A. Sothern first appeared under his own name. Barney Williams, the Sun’s first newsboy, was managing the Broadway Theatre, in Broadway near Broome Street. Edwin Booth was building a fine theatre of his own at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street—destined to score an artistic but not a financial success.
Club life was well advanced. In the house of the Century Club, then in East Fifteenth Street, the member would come upon Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, Parke Godwin, William Allen Butler, Edwin Booth, Lester Wallack, John Jacob Astor, August Belmont. The Union League was young, and was just about to move from a rented home at Broadway and Seventeenth Street to the Jerome house, at Madison Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street, where it remained until 1881, then to go to its present home in Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Ninth Street. In the Union League could be seen John Jay, Horace Greeley, William E. Dodge, and other enthusiastic Republicans. Upon occasion Mr. Dana went there, but he was not an ardent clubman.
All in all, the New York of Dana’s first year as an absolute editor was an interesting island, with just about as much of virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, sunlight and drabness, as may be found on any island of nine hundred thousand people. He did not set out to reform it. He did not try to turn the general journalism of that day out of certain deep grooves into which it had sunk. He had his own ideas of what news was, how it should be written, how displayed; but they were ideas, not theories. He was not perturbed because the Sun had not handled a big story just the way the Herald or the Tribune dished it up; nor was it of the slightest consequence to him what Mr. Bennett or Mr. Greeley thought of the way the Sun used the story.
Dana made no rules. Other newspapers have printed commandments for their writers, but the Sun has never wasted a penny’s worth of paper on rules. If there ever was a rule in the office, it was “Be interesting,” and it was not only an unwritten rule, but generally an unspoken one.
Dana’s realization that journalism was a profession which could be neither guided nor governed by set rules was expressed in a speech made by him before the Wisconsin Editorial Association at Milwaukee, in 1888:
There is no system of maxims or professional rules that I know of that is laid down for the guidance of the journalist. The physician has his system of ethics and that sublime oath of Hippocrates which human wisdom has never transcended. The lawyer also has his code of ethics and the rules of the courts and the rules of practice which he is instructed in; but I have never met with a system of maxims that seemed to me to be perfectly adapted to the general direction of a newspaperman. I have written down a few principles which occurred to me, which, with your permission, gentlemen, I will read for the benefit of the young newspapermen here to-night: