The first managing editor of the paper was Amos J. Cummings, with Allan Kelly as city editor and John McCormick as sporting editor. When Cummings went to Congress, E. J. Edwards took his place and remained as managing editor until August, 1889, when Arthur Brisbane returned from the post of London correspondent of the Sun to manage the evening paper.
It was Brisbane who induced Richard Harding Davis, then a young reporter in Philadelphia, to come to New York. As Davis was walking up from the ferry one morning in October, 1889, on his way to take up his new duties, he was taken in hand, in City Hall Park, by a bunco-steerer. Davis listened to the man’s wiles, turned him over to the police of the City Hall station, and then hurried to the Evening Sun office to write a story about it for the paper. Davis’s Van Bibber stories, the first of his fiction to attract wide attention, were originally printed in the Evening Sun, in 1890. As a reporter under Brisbane, Davis picked up much of the information and experiences that coloured his fiction.
When Brisbane went to the Pulitzer forces, he was succeeded as managing editor by W. C. McCloy, who had been city editor, and who remained at the head of the news department for more than twenty years.
Jacob A. Riis, who had been the police-headquarters reporter of the Tribune since 1877, went to the Evening Sun in 1890, coincident with the publication of his first popular work, “How the Other Half Lives.” Other of his works, including “The Children of the Poor” and “Out of Mulberry Street,” were written while he was the chief police reporter of the Evening Sun. Riis’s work was valuable, not only to the paper, but to the city itself. His writings attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt when the future President was head of the police board of New York (1895–1897), and the men became close friends. Together they worked to improve conditions in the tenement districts, and Roosevelt called Riis “New York’s most useful citizen.”
WILL IRWIN
FRANK WARD O’MALLEY
EDWIN C. HILL