Martling's Long Room

The Tammany Society, which grew into New York's most famous political machine, spent its first political years in the back room of a wooden tavern at the corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets, then called George Street. The tavern belonged to Abraham Martling. From about 1798 the society's members gathered in its Long Room, at the back, and became known around town as Martling Men. The building was low, unpainted and rough, and Tammany's enemies called it the Pig Pen. In these years, around 1800, Aaron Burr began to use the society as a political organisation rather than a social club. The society stayed at Martling's for more than ten years. On 13 May 1811, its anniversary, members marched in single file wearing bucktails to lay the cornerstone of their first Tammany Hall, at Nassau and Frankfort Streets a block north, and when the hall opened in 1812 Martling himself ran it as a hotel.

That hall was sold in 1867 and became the home of the Sun newspaper. The tavern site is now covered by 150 Nassau Street, the American Tract Society Building of 1895, one of the city's early steel-framed skyscrapers and a designated landmark. The circle closed neatly: in the 1910s the Sun left the old Tammany Hall and moved into the Tract Society Building, onto the site of the tavern where the society had begun.