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Dan had been married barely three months before it became his turn to receive one of the prime fruits of the Tammany system, the appointed post of corporation attorney of New York City. The corporation attorney was the lawyer who went to court on the instructions of the corporation counsel, an elective post held by Dan’s friend Dillon, for whom he had raided the Broadway post office. Dan’s new eminence carried with it a handsome retainer, augmented by generous fees for whatever law work he undertook on behalf of the city. But he was also free to take up any other briefs he chose to. 27
    Even with his political opportunism, Dan possessed a civic imagination, and one of his pet projects was to enable the New York Corporation to go ahead with creating a great central park. Though Dan would get very little or no mention in most histories of that huge endeavor, he would always argue that he had been one of the prime facilitators. At the time he became attorney to the corporation, there were pending before the assembly in Albany a number of bills appropriating plots of land in the upper part of the island of Manhattan to be used as a series of parks. Conflicts between the opponents and advocates of these projects, based on the desire of various people to develop the land privately, became so violent that all the park bills were doomed to failure. Dan was among the few enthusiasts who argued that this huge public park should reachas low as Twenty-third Street and stretch all the way up the island to the Harlem River. But the central park, he found, was a scheme that everyone liked in principle but lost interest in because of its difficulties.
    With some credibility, Dan depicted himself, in a long document now among his papers in the Library of Congress, as catching the train to Albany in the spring of 1853 to argue with politicians he knew for a revival of the scheme. “On my arrival,” he wrote, “I found the Capitol strewn with the remains of defeated Park Bills. . .. The warring champions of each of the old measures were invited to meet me in conference, over a good dinner. The banquet lasted well into the night, and before we separated the Senators interested . . . all agreed to support my consolidated plan for a park.” This was a characteristic Sickles manner of doing business.
    The result of the dinner meeting was that a bill was quickly passed in the assembly to authorize the city to proceed with the project, leaving the choice of ground to the municipal authorities of New York. Unfortunately, one senator with whom Dan would later quarrel over other matters in a national war, Edwin P. Morgan, managed to insert an amendment that he knew would cause Governor Horatio Seymour to refuse to sign the bill. When the governor did refuse, Dan promised to get that clause eliminated, even though this was the last day of the session, and there were only three hours left of it. But with the same degree of frenetic energy that had fueled the Broadway post office raid, Dan went off to the Senate chamber and was able to persuade Morgan to yield. Then he called on his personal friendship with a number of state senators to ensure consideration of his park bill that evening. “Unhappily, so many senators were absent during the call of the roll, that the affirmative vote was one or two short of the required constitutional number, but I was able to hurry from the lobby two or three friendly absentees.” So the bill was passed, and hurrying along to the assembly chamber with it, “I obtained the ear of the Speaker and got a hearing for my Bill in the Lower House, where the amendment was promptly concurred in.” It remained only to get the bill once more before the governor, and with the help of the clerks of both houses, this was achievedonly half an hour before the final adjournment. The document was sent at once to the office of the secretary of state. Dan wrote that “going there myself soon after, I was enabled to obtain from