Twenty Vesey Street — the narrow limestone building with the curved top and four enormous stone figures standing in niches high up the front. One of the very few art nouveau buildings ever put up in America, and almost nobody looks up at it.
Those figures are called the Four Periods of Publicity. Two were carved by the architect's wife. The other two were carved by Gutzon Borglum, who a few years later went out to South Dakota and carved four presidents into the side of a mountain.
The man who made Mount Rushmore warmed up on a newspaper office.
The newspaper was the New York Evening Post, and it was founded in eighteen oh-one by Alexander Hamilton.
He raised about ten thousand dollars from fellow Federalists, hired an editor named William Coleman, and started a daily paper. Jefferson had just won the presidency, the Federalists had lost everything, and Hamilton wanted something to hit people with.
Coleman later described how the editorials got written. Hamilton would come by at n
ight, refuse to sit down, and pace the room talking while Coleman wrote as fast as his hand would move.
Which is the whole man, really. Every door Hamilton ever got through, he wrote his way through.
He got off Saint Croix by writing about a hurricane. He got the Constitution ratified by writing fifty-one essays in six months. And in seventeen ninety-seven, when a journalist accused him of specu
