Forward! Into the Past!

[captainsblog]

My last post here, way back at the end of last week, skipped over the events of the previous Tuesday afternoon, when I got to spend two hours as one of the last people who would ever see the writing, editing, and printing facilities of a once great American newspaper before all remaining traces of it disappear forever.

I moved here for law school in 1981. At that time, Buffalo was one of the few remaining cities in America that had two seven-day newspapers run by completely separate organizations. I had left Ithaca to come here after working for a combination of three newspapers in Syracuse- Post-Standard morning, Herald-Journal afternoon and Herald-American Sunday- that were all owned by the Newhouse organization and run with a combined newsroom out of a large facility on the city’s historic Clinton Square.  I drove by that building on a road trip to the 315 in June; the afternoon and Sunday mastheads had long been retired, and the remaining Post-Standard has now  abandoned the building, with signs on it that it is being offered for sale or lease, with only “The Post” name left behind on a sign to remind anybody it had ever been there:

Rochester, the city I left here for in 1984, also then had a morning and an afternoon paper, but they were both part of the Gannett empire, with combined printing and advertising operations and eventually a combined newsroom. The afternoon Times-Union stopped running in the early 1990s, and what little is left of the remaining Demagogue and Comical also long ago moved its printing, and eventually its editorial offices, out of the downtown plant that was once the proud headquarters of the entire Gannett chain. It now also sits empty looking for someone to buy or lease it:



Buffalo's papers were separate and fiercely competitive until the end: the morning Courier Express, counting Mark Twain among its past editors, and the Evening News, owned locally until shortly before my move when it wound up in the hands of Warren Buffett. I'd worked for morning papers for the previous years, so I chose the Courier for my seven-day subscription. It took a year before it bit the dust.

(In a weird footnote to history, Rupert Murdoch put in an offer to buy the paper. It would have been only his third daily in the US, following his acquisitions of a paper in San Antonio and the New York Post. Between his demand for concessions and the promise of turning the paper into a sensationalist tabloid, the paper's union voted against his buyout offer, and the paper quickly died. The owners of the then-Evening News quickly started putting out a "Sunrise Edition" of their own paper and buying up the printing equipment up the road on Main Street, effectively killing off any competitors' interest in filling the void. The Gannett outfits in Niagara Falls and Rochester also stayed out of the market. If Murdoch had been allowed to purchase the Courier back in 1982, it might have begun a butterfly effect that could have prevented his launch of Fox News. Because back then, the FCC enforced "cross-ownership" rules that restricted a newspaper owner from owning a broadcast station in the same market. A few years after being turned down in his bid to buy the Buffalo paper, Murdoch bought New York City's WNEW-TV, and those rules forced him to sell the Post so he could begin building his broadcast empire. He wound up buying it back in the 90s after the inexperienced purchaser drove the Post into bankruptcy. It took a waiver from the FCC to allow him to buy the newspaper back- one that was granted with support from many New York leaders including Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. Would the FCC have allowed him to buy a New York TV station with two newspaper properties in the state? Maybe not, and maybe his FOX-5 station, the flagship of the Fox network brand that led to his cable holdings, might never have become the home for right-wing journalism we now know....)

But anyway, back to reality, that being the reality of now having another abandoned media factory in a downtown core.

Late the previous week, I was sent an event invitation from a local preservation group to take what would be one of the last tours of Buffalo's Brutalist 70s building before the newspaper finally turned over title to a local developer. (They apparently also let in a group of former reporters, either right before or after we had a turn.) Once my calendar was clear for that afternoon, I passed word to a Rochester friend and we met up outside one of the corner entrances to the building. On the editorial side of the facility, dating back to the early 1970s, there was very little left. The paper had either moved things to its much smaller new facility or auctioned them off; one of the few curiosities from an even earlier bygone era still had its auction tag on it (not shown in the photo I took):




All that remained were a lot of empty floors with horrible industrial carpet, occasional photos and scribblings on the walls, and plenty to imagine of what must’ve been even just a few years ago.  Other than that one ancient machine that probably wasn’t very practical, it looks like the auction sold off just about everything that wasn’t nailed down or glued to the wall. Fortunately, quite a bit still was. There were photo montages from events that were world famous-

-or at least locally famous-

- while the abandoned cafeteria on the editorial side of the building still had photos of the city’s even earlier abandoned industrial era, many of its grain silos survived the wrecking ball and are now being used for music, poetry, and other entertainment events.

Our guide from the newspaper staff, literally the last one out before they turn out the lights, started us on the top fifth floor of the building, and we then worked our way down. One surprising sight inside was a winter garden, still growing despite few people being in to see or tend it for many months.

We saw the former boardroom where the executives of the newspaper made brilliant decisions on things like paywalls:

And lots and lots of empty offices.

Then he took us down to the former advertising space on the fourth floor, where some artwork had been preserved. One of the first things I saw was a frighteningly prescient quote from 2004:

Along with some lovingly preserved examples of their campaigns, most of them for local businesses that long ago faded out of existence:



Then we moved to the editorial floor. “Floor” was about all that was left, looking more like a hockey rink without ice than a place where stories were once reported and edited and brought to the world.

There were a couple of offices that still had labels on them. This one was once occupied by Margaret Sullivan, who moved on from here to both the New York Times and the Washington Post. (I found her Facebook and sent her this one, which she confirmed and thanked me for- another blue-checky in my life:)

Perhaps the strangest was where the photographers used to hang out. They left all kinds of talismen behind, Including this one on a wall, which I would love to hear an explanation of-




This was one of the more ironic sites left on the editorial floor's wall:

And apparently they were playing Buzzword Bingo right up to the end:

This was a display on what must’ve been the sports section of the editorial floor. It completely missed the Josh Allen era, or  else they ripped down all the current stuff and took it with them:




Then we moved to the production side of the building. An older structure dating to the 1950s than the Brutalist building it was connected to. This was in the era before ugly industrial carpeting, and the floors showed it:

There were also left-behind displays on the side, probably for school tour groups that came through back when this was a working facility:

The production side had its own cafeteria, also stripped of all function, but with his own set of even earlier industrial memories of the city:

We began, literally, at the end. Remember those old movies on the Late Late Late Show, showing newspapers rolling off of printing press and dropping into baskets with the BIG HEADLINE OF THE (PREVIOUS) DAY? They used to do that here.



Just one remaining paper was literally at the end of the line before they shut it down and moved daily production of the paper to Cleveland.  Unlike 42 years ago, when this paper ripped out the printing facilities of its former competitor, the current ones knew that no one in their right mind would ever try to start a daily newspaper today, so it was all just left there. Inks and buttons and WARNING signs all over, attesting to a world that really no longer exists.

I could go on adding photos to this for days. Hell, I already have. It's a time-consuming process going from phone to laptop to server to get these all in. (I also discovered that my new phone was defaulting to taking pictures in something called .heic format which is much harder to work with outside AppleLand, so I've changed that setting.) For now, then, this much shorter version of the final hour or so of our climbing steep and narrow stairs, dodging dangling wires, and imagining how it all must've been.




All of that climbing and exploring, finally got us to the exit.

No, not that one. (Unless they were putting on Jean Paul Sartre plays at the end.)  This one:




Other than the one final set of photos I’ll get to, and the one mentioned last week that came home with me, our time in this building was done. Nobody has any idea what is going to become of it. The developer has talked about a ground floor restaurant, some kind of newspaper museum space, and probably condos to take advantage of the five story urban views from it; but with interest rates still being high and him having a lot of other projects in his portfolio right now, it may wind up just joining the upstate preserved amber of journalistic empty that I passed in my other travels over the past few weeks.

----

That leaves the photo I took home, and the pallets full of history that we saw just before leaving.

I have no idea who she is. I have only slightly more of an idea who the photographer is, because I did find one online photograph from Buffalo credited to a George Butler, dating to 1970. Our tour guide invited us to take any of the assorted matted photographs that had been taken off the walls, since they were likely just to wind up in the trash anyway. Something in this one spoke to me, and I now have it hanging in my home office.

What I didn’t take, couldn’t have, but I hoped somebody will, is the much larger collection of history that we saw just laying on the floor in the production area.

Stack after stack of bound volumes from the past. From relatively recent to very, very different and even at least one from a paper going back to an even older time in the city’s history-

I reached out to a number of people who might have connections in either the newspaper’s past or with specialties in history. At least one former staff member, more focused on broadcast media, did tell me he had asked about these volumes years ago and was told they didn’t exist anymore. Museums apparently have already digitized their content and don’t seem interested in lugging around the actual paper and dust. So most likely these, too, will wind up in a bonfire or or a landfill.

----

So that was a century that was, plus or minus a decade or two. Now I need to get back to this one, and the mostly good things that have happened for us, and the nation, in this past week.

Comments

[thanatos_kalos]

That tour looks incredible! Shame that the paper archives won't be preserved-- I don't know anyone in the US who has the right facilities, (though UT Austin might). :( Is there someone who could be contacted about preserving/acquiring them? I could put a notice on some of the media/journalism email lists and see if anyone wants them, or possibly contact a couple of librarians I know...

[weofodthignen]

Oh, that's sad. The whole thing, not just the final ouch.

The NYPL used to have a newspapers branch, in the W. 30s or 40s, that reportedly contained bound volumes. Shoot them a line? But the previous commentator's contacts have a higher chance of panning out than my decades-old knowledge.

[siercia]

Oh, this breaks my heart a little bit, they were customers back in the day and I spent a few long weeks haunting those halls getting systems working and upgraded for them. Glad to see at least that they aren't shutting down, Lee is a better parent company to be owned by these days than most.