ll. Not an attractive building, with these many windows always
staring, like eyes, across the road into the park, but one to be
remembered because, for one reason or another, it could well be called
the literary centre of the town. Here it stood, the first Park
Theatre, towering above its neighbors, glistening in its newness.

[Illustration: The Corner Stone of the Park Theatre

The corner stone of
this Theatre was laid
on the 5th day of May
AD 1795

Jacob Morton }
Wm. Henderson } Commissioners
Carlile Pollock }

Lewis Hallem }
John Hodgkinson } managers]

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.

[Illustration: 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