The Sun (New York City)

“ Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, reads the Sun; nor can even a boy be found in New York City or the neighboring country who will not know in the course of the day what is promulgated in the Sun in the morning. ”

“ It faced City Hall Park and was a part of Printing-House Square. Dana was right about the productiveness of the real estate, for no spot in New York sees more pedestrians go by than the Nassau-Frankfort corner. The Sun lived there for forty-three years, and its present home, taken when the old hall became too small and ancient, is only a block away.
The first number of the Sun issued under Dana—Monday, January 27, 1868—contained a long sketch of Tammany Hall and its former home, concluding:
Peace succeeds to strife. ”

“ Another walked “on both sides of the street, like a twopenny postman,” while a third “spent his money at a theatre with females,” while his family was in want. But, added the Sun, “we never let personalities creep in.”
The New York Times—not the present Times—had also started up, and it dared to boast of a circulation “greater than any in the city except the Courier.” Said the Sun:
If the daily circulation of the Sun be not larger than that of the Times and Courier both, then may we be hung up by the ears and flogged to death with a rattle-snake’s skin. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Sun will always have all the news, foreign, domestic, political, social, literary, scientific, and commercial. It will use enterprise and money freely to make the best possible newspaper, as well as the cheapest.
It will study condensation, clearness, point, and will endeavor to present its daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in the most luminous and lively manner.
It will not take as long to read the Sun as to read the London Times or Webster’s Dictionary, but when you have read it you will know about all that has happened in both hemispheres. ”

“ To me the real Ville Lumière is New York. It scatters lights with the prodigal richness with which the heaven scatters stars. It strings them in long lines; it banks them in towering façades; it flings them in handfuls up into the darkness; it writes them on the sky. Twilight offers you a special beauty because, wherever you are in the city, it brings out for you in one window or another that first wan, primrose-colored beacon—in some ways more beautiful than the evening star. Behind the star you don’t know what there is, while behind the light there is a palpitating history. ”

“ Winter in New York has its hardships and toil, and it has its joys as well, among rich and poor. Grim and relentless, it is beautiful at all times until man puts his befouling hand upon the landscape it paints in street and alley, where poetry is never at home in summer. The great city lying silent under its soft white blanket at night, with its myriad of lights twinkling and rivalling the stars, is beautiful beyond compare. Go watch the moonlight on forest and lake in the park, when the last straggler has gone and the tramp of the lonely policeman's horse has died away under the hill ”

“ Another True Sun was issued by Benjamin H. Day in 1840, two years after he sold the Sun to Moses Y. Beach. A third True Sun, established by former employees of the Sun on March 20, 1843, ran for more than a year. A daily called the Citizen and True Sun, started in 1845, had a short life.
61
When a contemporary did not fail the Sun poked fun at it:
MAJOR NOAH’S SINGULARITY—The Evening Star of yesterday comes out in favor of the French, lottery, gambling, and phrenology for ladies. ”

“ These printers and compositors were an intelligent body of men, seeking always to benefit their condition and studiously alive to the new ideas with which the country was then teeming.
With the founding of the New York Sun, we come to consider the history of great popular institutions. Older newspapers came to have something of the same influence as the Sun, notably the Evening Post, under Bryant and later under Godkin. But the Sun was the first popular paper; its story, as Mr. Edward P. Mitchell
has said, is that of a living thing, altogether aside from the men who made it. ”

“ But the sun has thrown more light upon the moon, and the theory of its being inhabited, than any other luminary. The sun, we say—but not the real sun, nor the True Sun, but the sun which “shines for all”—The New York Sun—the Sun of Moses Y. Beach—and Son. ”

“ In book-reviewing a hundred pens have served the Sun. Hazeltine, E. P. Mitchell, Willard Bartlett, Erasmus D. Beach, George Bendelari, Miss Dana Gatlin, H. M. Anderson, and Grant M. Overton are but a few of the men and women who have told Sun readers what’s worth while.
For Sun reporters the Sunday paper has been a favourable field for an excursion into fiction-writing. In its columns a man with a tale to tell has every chance. There William Norr gave, in his “Pearl of Chinatown,” the real atmosphere of a little part of New York that once held romance. ”

“ There is a vast quantity of electricity in the air, and the displays of lightning are magnificent and occasionally destructive. Sunshine is very abundant. One can by no means judge from the brightest day in New York of the wonderful glow sunlight has here. ”

“ The sun, like a little man in a crowd at a puppet-show, scampered about the heavens, popping his head here and there, and endeavoring to get a peep between the unmannerly clouds that obtruded themselves in his way. ”

“ So much for man's improvements on Nature, which is the proper task of civilization and true culture. But what of God's free gifts of sunlight, air, and water?
One of the pleasantest advantages of wintering in New York, in my humble opinion, is not the bright lights of Broadway, but God's pure sunshine. The average city house, squeezed in between similar houses, does not, I admit, get much more of this free gift than a tent pitched in a canyon. ”

“ Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along upper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make “all [153] the night a steam of fire,” and round the tall tower of the Times Building the vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam of light from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit to any of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us more keen to cherish and to expand it. ”

“ And in modern times they seem dark and gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air of Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day, for at best the sun gets into these valleys for only a few minutes, so high have the tall buildings grown. ”

“ The real spring in New York comes when blundering nature has painted the outer wilderness for autumn. What is called "spring" in the city by unreflecting users of the word is a tame, insipid season yawning into not more than half-wakefulness at best. The trees in the gas-poisoned soil are slow in their greening, the grass has but a pallid city vitality, and the rows of gaudy tulips set out primly about the fountains in the squares are palpably forced and alien. ”

“ Yesterday--the hottest day of the season--we set out for New York. I thought it was going to be sultry, when, as we passed Washington Square before sunrise, on our way to the boat, I saw the blue haze among the trees, as still and soft and hay-scented as if in the country. Ben often quotes an old Scotch proverb,--"Daylight will peep through a sma' hole." So beauty will peep through every small corner that is left to Nature, even under severe restrictions. ”

“ Already can we perceive a change in the mass of the people. They think, talk, and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel that they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success.
The Sun newspaper has probably done more to benefit the community by enlightening the minds of the common people than all the other papers together.
Day found New York journalism a pot of cold, stale water, and left it a boiling caldron ”

“ A boy, whose name is unknown to fame, assisted him at devil’s work. A journeyman printer, Parmlee, helped25 with the press when the last quoin had been made tight in the fourth and last of the little pages.
The sun was well up in the sky before its namesake of New York came slowly, hesitatingly, almost sadly, up over the horizon of journalism—never to set! In the years to follow, the Sun was to have changes in ownership, in policy, in size, and in style, but no week-day was to come when it could not shine. ”

“ Surely down-town New York is the most dismal spot in the world at night—a veritable city of the dead. The silent, empty streets have an atmosphere of utter gloom—the buildings dark and forbidding stand in gruesome solemnity or huddle together in hideous attitudes of fear—the deserted offices here and there show a shaded light in some rear room, but the ghastly glow only intensifies the darkness, and over all is the silence—the awful silence—of the night. ”

“ But how many know that it is probably the one sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, even to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?
They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, and all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. ”

“ Should the criticism be made that this book is not all-inclusive, let it be remembered that there can be no really complete history of the Sun except itself—the tons of files in which for eighty-five years Sun men have drawn their pictures of life’s procession. In a narrative like this only the outlines of the Sun’s course, margined with incidents of the men who made it great by making it as human as themselves, can find room. ”

“ A simple and impressive bronze vertical dial on the wall of the Dutch Reformed Church on West End Avenue, New York, is shown on page 346. The sun-dial standing before the rectory of Grace Church on Broadway, New York, is on page 364.
Sun-dial at Ophir Farm, White Plains, New York, Country-seat of Hon. Whitelaw Reid.
There is ever much question as to a suitable pedestal for garden sun-dials: it must not stand so high that the dial-face cannot be looked down upon by grown persons; it must not be so light as to seem rickety, nor so heavy as to be clumsy. ”

“ The curious effect on American journalism of the conflict between Sun methods and the so-called new journalism was referred to, in an address delivered at Yale University on January 12, 1903, by Frank A. Munsey, then owner of the New York Daily News and now proprietor of the Sun:
The newspaperman of to-day is a composite type, the product of the Sun and the New York World of fifteen or eighteen years ago. ”

“ This is probably one reason why our æsthetic sense is not adjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects of New York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our subconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for low sky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in New York, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect of the lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washington Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. ”

“ Lying in full sight of the ocean, with its magnificent bay to the southward, and the East and Hudson Rivers washing its shores, the city of New York possesses a climate which renders it the most delightful residence in America. In the winter the proximity of the sea moderates the severity of the cold, and in the summer the heat is tempered by the delightful sea breezes which sweep over the island. Snow seldom lies in the streets for more than a few hours, and the intense “heated terms” of the summer are of very brief duration. ”

“ As an offset to the discomforts of winter observations of the stars, the observer finds that the softer skies of summer have no such marvelous brilliants to dazzle his eyes as those that illumine the hyemal heavens. To comprehend the real glories of the celestial sphere in the depth of winter one should spend a few clear nights in the rural districts of New York or New England, when the hills, clad with sparkling blankets of crusted snow, reflect the glitter of the living sky. ”

“ Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. ”