Farewell 43rd
Thursday night the Times had a beer bash to say farewell to the building on 43rd Street that the paper called home since 1913. Before I share my thoughts, I think this post is a decent place for me to lay out a personal ground rule for this blog. I won’t be discussing any Times stories, ones that I write or ones that I read, except maybe to recommend one by posting a link. It’s too easy to muddy the waters, second-guess and create conflicts of interest after the fact. I don’t want to get into any of that. But leaving the building was more of a historic event and plenty of outsiders were there to witness it.
It was more raucous and less solemn than I had expected, with the promise of no speeches kept (at least while I was there). The event wasn’t quite the dork-fest that Gawker said it was either. There were older people who weren’t keeping any pretense of cool, but also younger Style staffers, photographers, 22-year-old clerks. It was more egalitarian than anything with writers, clerks, maintenance people, family and friends all there.
Shortly after the Love Train (like a congo-line, but to the O’Jays song some will think of as “The Coors Light Song”) finished wending its way through the newsroom, we went upstairs to look at the Sulzberger apartment, which was one of the coolest places I’d ever been, a hidden sanctum with a century’s worth of mementos and titillating tales of visiting showgirls. I have a tendency to fall in love with buildings and places where I’ve spent more than a month or two and the Times building was no different. When we got upstairs there were people milling around taking pictures and souvenirs. A friend compared it to the looting of Baghdad.
The difference was that where a sign said, “Do Not Touch,” like a grandfather clock they hadn’t moved yet, no one touched. Respectful looting. Cautious chaos. But everyone was let down by the magical, famous, private quarters. Without the stuff they were just a couple of rooms with off-white walls. I half expected to hear a broker to half-heartedly say, “It gets great light and with a little paint…”
It made me feel sad not in a nostalgic way, but in a more fateful way. They remind you in the news business that Monday’s story lines a parakeet cage on Tuesday. The building is being recycled. We’ve moved on. Not long after that the people we were wandering around with broke up and we all went our separate ways.
