George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall district leader and former state senator, kept no office. According to the newspaperman William Riordon, his headquarters was the bootblack stand in the New York County Courthouse on Chambers Street, the building now called the Tweed Courthouse. There, Riordon wrote, he received his constituents, transacted his business and poured forth his philosophy. Riordon collected those talks in 1905 as Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, subtitled very plain talks on very practical politics, delivered from the bootblack stand as his rostrum. The best known of them distinguishes honest graft from dishonest graft. Dishonest graft was robbing the city; honest graft was knowing in advance where the city planned to build, and buying the land first.
"I seen my opportunities and I took 'em," Plunkitt says, and he proposed the line for his epitaph. The words are as Riordon rendered them, and he had a reporter's ear for dialect. Plunkitt, born in 1842 and dead in 1924, once held four public offices in a single year, 1870. The setting suited the sermon. The courthouse, begun in 1861 and not finished until 1881, cost the city many times its value through the contracts of Boss Tweed's ring, and it remains the city's most famous monument to graft. It now houses the Department of Education.
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