Headquarters
In its very early days, the Tammany Society used a room in a tavern on Chatham Street – which is now Park Row – as an unofficial campaign headquarters on election days, referring to it as "Tammanial Hall". In 1791, the society opened a museum designed to collect together artifacts relating to the events and history of the United States. Originally presented in an upper room of City Hall, it moved to the Merchant's Exchange when that proved to be too small. The museum was unsuccessful, and the Society severed its connections with it in 1795.
The original headquarters building for the Society, the first Tammany Hall, was built in 1830 in Manhattan at 141 East 14th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, but the building was not primarily the clubhouse of a political organization:
Tammany Hall merged politics and entertainment, already stylistically similar, in its new headquarters ... The Tammany Society kept only one room for itself, renting the rest to entertainment impresarios: Don Bryant's Minstrels,a German theater company, classical concerts and opera. The basement – in the French mode – offered the Café Ausant, where one could see tableux vivant, gymnastic exhibitions, pantomimes, and Punch and Judy shows. There was also a bar, a bazaar, a Ladies' Cafe, and an oyster saloon. All this – with the exception of Bryant's – was open from seven till midnight for a combination price of fifty cents.
The building had an auditorium of sufficient size to hold public meetings, and a smaller one that became Tony Pastor's Music Hall, where vaudeville had its beginnings.
In 1927 the building on 14th Street was sold, to make way for the new tower being added to the Consolidated Edison Company Building. The Society's new building, located in Manhattan on East 17th Street and Union Square East, was finished and occupied by 1929. After the Society folded in the 1960s, the building was turned over to commercial usage, and now houses the New York Film Academy and the Union Square Theatre.
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Famous quotes containing the word headquarters:
“What does headquarters think these guys came over here for, a sewing circle? They go up playing for keeps. Cops and robbers with rocks in the snowballs. Brass knuckles and lead pipes and a roughneck conviction they can lick any man in the world.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“Anything goes in Wichita. Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“If the national security is involved, anything goes. There are no rules. There are people so lacking in roots about what is proper and what is improper that they don’t know there’s anything wrong in breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party.”
—Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900–1980)