The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

CHAPTER XVII

SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM
Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Two 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.
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