What was the best story ever printed in the Sun? It may be that that story has been quoted from in these articles; and yet, if a thousand years hence some super-scientist should invent a literary measure that would answer the question, the crown of that high and now unbestowable honour of authorship might fall to some man here unmentioned and elsewhere unsung. Perhaps it was an article only two hundred words long.
CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM
Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Turn Years.—Clarke, Magician of the Copy Desk.—Ethics, Fair Play and Democracy.—“The Evening Sun” and Those Who Make It.
For forty-seven years the city or news room of the Sun was on the third floor of the brick building at the south corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, a five-story house built for Tammany Hall in 1811, when that organization found its quarters in Martling’s Tavern—a few doors south, on part of the site of the present Tribune Building—too small for its robust membership.
In the days of Grand Sachems William Mooney, Matthew L. Davis, Lorenzo B. Shepard, Elijah F. Purdy, Isaac V. Fowler, Nelson J. Waterbury, and William D. Kennedy, and the big and little bosses, including Tweed, this third-floor room had been used as a general meeting-hall. It was here, in 1835, that the Locofoco—later the Equal Rights—party was born after a conflict in which the regular Tammany men, finding themselves in the minority, turned off the gas and left the reformers to meet by the light of locofoco matches. It was a room from which many a Democrat was hurled because he preferred De Witt Clinton to Tammany’s favourite, Martin Van Buren. Two flights of long, straight stairs led to the ground floor. They were hard to go up; they must have been extremely painful to go down bouncing.
It was a long, wide, barnlike room, lighted by five windows that looked upon Park Row and the City Hall. The stout old timbers were bare in the ceiling and in them were embedded various hooks and ring-bolts to which, once upon a time, was attached gymnasium apparatus used by a turn verein, which hired the room when the Tammanyites did not need it.
It was not a beautiful room. Mr. Dana never did anything to improve it except in a utilitarian way, and from the time when he bought the building from the Tammany Society, in 1867, until it was torn down in 1915, the old place looked very much the same. Of course, new gas-jets were added, these to be followed by electric-light wires, until the upper air had a jungle-like appearance, and there were rude, inexpensive desks and telephone-booths.
The floor was efficient, for it was covered with rubber matting that deadened alike the quick footstep of Dana and the thundering stride of pugilistic champions who came in to see the sporting editor. But the city room’s only ornaments were men and their genius. Here wrote Ralph and Chamberlin, Spears and Irwin, and all the rest of the fine reporters of the old building’s years.
Near the windows of this shabby room were the desks of the men who planned news-hunts, chose the hunters, and mounted their trophies. Six desks handled all the news-matter in the old city room of the Sun. The managing editor sat at a roll-top in the northwest corner, near a door that led to Mr. Dana’s room. A little distance to the east was the night editor’s desk. At the large flat-top desk near the managing editor three men sat—the cable editor, who handled all foreign news; the “Albany man,” who edited articles from the State and national capitals and all of New York State; and the telegraph editor, who took care of all other wire matter.