Free American Scoundrel by Thomas Keneally Page A

the bar would be retained to oppose the confirmation, Dan was determined to get both the park and Buchanan on New York’s agenda.
    In a characteristic stratagem, he drafted a letter to the governor, pointing out that the calendars of the courts were seriously overcrowded. He asked for an additional judge from rural New York to be detailed to the city for a few months to clear up the backlog. He managed to get his letter signed by thirty or forty leading members of the bar, and the governor indicated that he would designate an additional judge with pleasure, if one could be found. Dan already had one, a friend and future Democratic senator, Ira Harris, judge of the Superior Court in the Albany District. Calling at his house, Dan found him away from home, but Mrs. Harris and the daughters of the family received Dan and were charmed by “the suggestion that the judge might be detailed to sit in New York.” He then chased Judge Harris to the small rustic courthouse in Monticello, in Sullivan County. After the court rose, at the village tavern Dan presented the judge with the proposal, and rushed toAlbany with the judge’s letter of consent. Within a day, Harris was formally designated an additional justice of the court in the City of New York.
    Dillon was delighted at Dan’s achievement and said, “Before an impartial judge it is worth while to attempt a hearing.” Dillon gave notice to the city bench that a motion would be made for the confirmation of the commissioners’ report in the matter of the central park. On the day named for hearing the motion, Judge Roosevelt, the senior judge, an opponent of the park, was seated in the largest courtroom in the building, usually occupied by the Superior Court, on the second floor of the western wing of City Hall, ready to hear and dismiss the motion. A great array of counsel, “the most distinguished members of our bar,” were in their places to oppose it. Judge Roosevelt, Dan noticed, looked serenely happy. “I could fancy I saw his blade, freshly sharpened,” wrote Dan with his usual vividness of imagery, “ready to cut out the vitals of the Central Park report and redden the carpets of the sanctuary of justice with the blood of the victims.”
    But a crier mounted the bench and, “in the stereotype twang of those officials,” announced, “All persons interested in the matter of the application of the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of New York for the confirmation of the report of the Commissioners of the Central Park, draw near before Mr. Judge Harris of the Supreme Court in Room One, in the City Hall, and be heard.”
    The company rose as one man and found their way downstairs into Room One, the smallest courtroom in City Hall. Judge Harris sat for a month on the commissioners’ report, with Dillon and Dan arguing in its favor, and in that time Mrs. Harris and her daughters were courted with invitations to parties, receptions, theaters, balls, in the hope that they would influence Judge Harris to reject the report. But after a month, he confirmed it. “Then for the first time,” wrote Dan, “New York was assured of a great public park within its boundaries.”
    But Dan encountered a further bar to his plans. The city itself lacked the authority to appropriate money to improve the site of the park,which was “one of the roughest and most forbidding spots on the face of the globe. It was a vast mass of rocks and boulders, variegated here and there by an irredeemable swamp.” The New York State legislature would have to grant approval for the city to make the necessary appropriations. 22
    In the meantime Dan was driven by his own shortage of money to take private briefs. One client was a Dr. David Jobson, a Scots dentist, formerly surgeon dentist to the royal family of England and author of a well-known textbook on teeth. Dr. Jobson had met in New York an American dentist named John Allan, who had sued yet another dentist for infringement of a patent