But the journal’s chief interest lay in the amazing cost of the site--$20,500 for a plot 25 by 40 feet. This, it said, was as striking evidence of the city’s growth as the “twenty elegant ships” which now plied regularly to Liverpool. What part had the _Evening Post_ tried to play in this transformation of a provincial town into a metropolis? William Cullen Bryant states that when he joined the journal in 1826, it was “much occupied with matters of local interest, the sanitary condition of the city, the state of its streets, its police, its regulations of various kinds.” That had always been true. No other New York editor of the time took an interest in civic improvements that approached Coleman’s. For the paper’s first fifteen years it might have been questioned whether it viewed with greater dismay the errors of the Democrats at Washington or the running at large of great numbers of hogs within the city limits. New Yorkers of to-day think of the toleration of swine as characteristic only of the backward Southern towns described by Mark Twain; but our great-grandfathers saw them rooting in City Hall Park and basking in Broadway and Wall Street. As Coleman told his readers in 1803, they were “a multitude.” Some men made a business of raising them. One householder of the Fifth Ward in 1803 had sixty at large; fifteen years later Coleman knew a colored man who had more than forty. Whenever, from a diet of dead cats and other gutter dainties, they threatened to become diseased, they were hurried to the butcher; with the result that fastidious people ate no pork. Every one admitted that they were unsightly, malodorous, and kept the walks filthy, while every few months a carriage upset over one. But the poor demanded them, and it was argued they were scavengers. The one restriction, ill-enforced, was that their noses be ringed to protect the turf.