"It was in 1846, just at this period of rampant Tammany corruption, which was 
beginning to become somewhat too obvious, that Washington Irving returned to 
New York from Spain, where he had been Minister of the United States. He was 
received enthusiastically by the populace of New York, and Tammany joined 
vigorously in the welcome, for Tammany Hall needed a reputable man. The 
leaders of Tammany Hall offered Washington Irving the nomination for Mayor of 
New York. "It was not as a literary man especially that they desired to honor 
Irving," wrote Mrs. Euphemia Vale Blake, "for they had always plenty of 
literary timber at hand, but partly for old association's sake, and from 
their natural instinct to honor any man who had brought honor to America." 
Irving declined, and Tammany Hall nominated instead Andrew H. Mickle, who was 
born in a hut in the "Bloody Sixth" Ward; it was said by his opponents that 
no less than a dozen pigs were present at the birth and lived with the family 
for many years. Mickle had married the daughter of a wealthy tobacco 
merchant. He was elected Mayor of New York, and when he died, he left an 
estate valued at more than a million dollars." Tammany Hall, M. R. Werner, 
Doubleday, 1928.

My wife protests heaps of books in our small house (two dogs, one iguana, and 
two hedge hogs)… but with occasional diversion of shifting them around in 
order to accommodate a new proposal on our mode of living, interesting facts 
ascend to the superficial. The fact here being that Andrew Mickle is, in our 
renewed and ever expansive kin mythology, presumed to be a forebear to the 
family that I married onto. Not lingering overly long on swine, the question 
now is, "Where is the money?" 

I doubt much the hut in the "Bloody Sixth" Ward stands still, and hesitate to 
go looking for it lest it be infested with crack heads or other pesky 
entrepreneurs, but as to heritage and salting away huts for posterity, I rue 
those who would have indiscriminately torn down a structure of such 
significance to the future of our venerated family, that is, unless it had 
been remuddled beyond recollection and in possession of a university.

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