They call it the Tweed Courthouse, because only New York would name a municipal building after the city’s greatest scoundrel. I worked there at a low-level job some years ago, answering letters to the mayor, in one of the throwaway city departments they liked to store in the old courthouse, in the hopes it would never be heard from again.

I liked to call it The Building They Never Stopped Building, because it never seemed that we had gotten around to finishing with it. A weighty, classical edifice of iron and gray marble, it has squatted behind the city’s elegant city hall like an unwanted stepchild since the 1860s. No one quite knew what to do with the thing until a few years ago, when it was agreed that it would serve as the new home of the Museum of the City of New York. A brilliant, $90-million-dollar renovation “restored” the courthouse to a luster it had never really known, and the museum was all set to move in.

Now Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is insisting that instead he will move the Board of Education, and maybe an experimental school, into the Tweed Courthouse, as part of his effort to take control of the city’s faltering school system. Ironically, the mayor’s problems with the Board of Ed are due in no small part to the courthouse’s old namesake.

William Marcy “Boss” Tweed was the great, Falstaffian, Tammany sachem who became the embodiment of corrupt, machine politics. The Tweed building—officially the Municipal Courthouse—was the crown in his jewel. Originally budgeted at $250,000, it ended up costing taxpayers over $13 million—more than four times what it cost to build Britain’s Houses of Parliament, and almost twice what it cost the United States to purchase Alaska in 1867, while the courthouse was still sluggishly rising along New York’s nascent skyline.

Its construction took 13 years, and served as a master class in political graft. Favored contractors were hired to do incompetent work, in exchange for a sizable kickback—then hired again to make “repairs.” The result was bills that were, in the phrase of reformer Robert Roosevelt, “not merely monstrous, they are manifestly fabulous.” Andrew Garvey, soon to be dubbed “the Prince of Plasterers,” charged the remarkably precise total of $2,870,460.06—including $1,294,685.13 in repairs—for a plastering job estimated at $20,000. Furnishings alone cost as much as it took to run the U.S. Post Office for a year. Each window was an estimated $8,000. Over $41,000 was spent on brooms. Some $350,000 was spent on carpeting—enough, one newspaper estimated, to line a hallway from New York to New Haven.

When good government types demanded an investigation, the Tweed-run Board of Supervisors insisted that they already had a committee of investigation in place. Nonetheless, the board obligingly appointed a new, Special Committee to investigate the investigating committee. It submitted its report within twelve days, clearing everyone of any malfeasance—and submitting a bill for its own services of over $18,000.

For all that, when Tweed was finally bundled off to Ludlow Street jail in 1871, the courthouse was still not finished. The roof was not even completed; several offices, far south of New Haven, had no carpeting—and the plaster was peeling.

“The whole atmosphere is corrupt,” claimed a contemporary. “You look up at its ceilings and find gaudy decorations; you wonder which is the greatest, the vulgarity or the corruptness of the place.”

This quickly became the general consensus, and for decades after Tweed’s demise the state legislature busied itself dividing up the functions of the city’s government, in an effort to ensure that no man could gain such absolute power again. Meanwhile, the house that Tweed built moldered under an air of disgrace. It was patched up and put to work as a court until 1926, but after that much of it lay empty, and there were repeated proposals in the 1940s and ’50s to tear it down altogether.

By 1987, when I worked there, it had been divided into warren-like offices, covered with linoleum tiles and furnished with classic, bureaucratic metal desks and filing cabinets. Time had done nothing to wipe away the dirt and grime of Tweed’s era, and in the men’s room I often spied the antennae of a gigantic cockroach, longer than my fingers, poking out from behind a urinal. I liked to fancy that the creature was a reincarnation of the Boss himself, putting out feelers to pick up the prevailing political winds.

For all that, one could see that the courthouse was actually a gorgeous old pile, endowed with all the attributes that even notorious grafters considered mandatory for a civic building back in the nineteenth century. The building’s magnificent central rotunda, its beautiful cage elevator and its spacious, high-ceilinged rooms made it a natural for what television thought a venerable courthouse should look like, and before long crime dramas were routinely filming their corridor scenes along its interior balconies.

It is, as well, a natural museum space, and it would be a pity for New Yorkers not see such a rich part of our history up close. Putting the city’s schools directly under one man’s authority is a worthy goal, but if the mayor’s writ does not run to Brooklyn, where the Board of Education is currently situated, there is probably no hope for any real reform.

Mayor Bloomberg is indulging in the politics of symbolism, which is a luxury we can ill afford in the wake of September 11. To move in the Board of Ed now would be to throw away the $90 million the city has already spent readying the Tweed courthouse for a museum—not to mention the $3 million it is required to pay the museum for breaking its agreement, and the millions more it will take to move the board, and renovate the renovations so that the building can be turned back into city offices.

Somewhere, the Boss is smiling.