Media Capital

ARCHITECTURE AND COMMUNICATIONS IN NEW YORK CITYBy Aurora Wallace

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07882-8

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………..viiIntroduction…………………………………………..11. News Capital………………………………………..132. New Buildings and New Spaces………………………….373. Nineteenth-Century Stories and Columns…………………634. Art Deco News……………………………………….895. Postwar News………………………………………..117Epilogue………………………………………………133Notes…………………………………………………151Bibliography…………………………………………..163Index…………………………………………………171

Chapter One

News Capital

Published daily at 222 William Street. The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising. The sheet will be enlarged as soon as the increase of advertisements requires it—the price remaining the same. —New York Sun, September 3, 1833

On its very first day of publication, the New York Sun inserted itself into the landscape of the city by laying bare its location, publisher, and mandate. The paper’s ubiquity on street corners, with its headlines readily visible and accessible to passersby, moved printed material into the realm of the public and out of the rarefied seclusion of taverns, clubs, and domestic spaces. Its one-cent price was the final blow to the stodgy mercantile papers that came in the mail. For a penny even the poorest laborer could indulge at least occasionally, and to lure these new readers the content and the form of the paper changed radically as well.

The partisan and mercantile papers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century contained little that we would consider news by today’s or even nineteenth-century standards. They were composed of shipping news that would often be weeks old at the time of printing, and only received by subscribers several weeks after that. The main source of news was correspondence from people at a distance, and its mode of circulation was revealed in the names given to many of these early papers: “Post,” “Mail,” or “Courier.” Once received by the editor-publisher, these news items would be selected, anthologized, and listed, rather than arranged, on a page of newsprint. The jobs of editor, publisher, and typesetter were conflated into one undifferentiated set of tasks in which the main objective was the gathering and display of items from elsewhere. With the emergence of the penny papers, of which the Sun was the first in New York, these tasks were separated and specialized. The paper could no longer simply rely on news from elsewhere, and it had to be more current to have a new, consumable product every day. To fill these pages, an entirely new approach to “news” and “information” was taken, to include not only what some segments of the population might need to know to carry out business transactions, but what the larger population could be persuaded to want to know. As Sun historian Frank O’Brien has shown,

It was hard to get out a successful daily newspaper without daily news. A weekly would have sufficed for the information that came in, by sailing ship and stage, from Europe and Washington and Boston. Ben Day was the first man to reconcile himself to an almost impossible situation. He did so by the simple method of using what news was nearest at hand—the incidental happenings of New York life. In this way he solved his own problem and the people’s, for they found that the local items in the Sun were just what they wanted, while the price of the paper suited them well.

This new journalism involved new strategies for news gathering: to seek out the events as they were taking place and to present them in a manner consistent with the narrative storytelling of fiction. Whereas discrete items of news from many different papers had once been placed on a page without regard for context or consistency, items were now written into short narratives with characters, contexts, and structured beginnings, middles, and ends. This embellishment became a hallmark of the “penny press” that would aid drawing readers in, as well as filling page space. The manner of daily publication also ensured a new market of buyers the next day, since no one issue of the paper could possibly tell the whole story of the lived experience of the city.

The centrality of New York as a dominant shipping port providing the gateway from the Atlantic to the inland United States made it a propitious center for newspaper development. The confluence of major waters is a necessity for any major trading city, but the bay where the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, and the Atlantic Ocean come together puts Manhattan Island on “the finest harbor in the Western Hemisphere.” These deep, ice-free waters could accommodate hundreds of ships at a time, and being first to receive the news from Europe, New York traders were in the best position to relay information to the rest of the country. Acknowledging this position of privilege, printers who needed to make extra money between contracts began to use their presses to gather and document this information. What Michael Warner noted in his exploration of the press in colonial America was still largely true in the nineteenth century: “Like other capitalized trades of the period, [presses] were almost always in the seaports; and printers had a very special relationship with the merchants and ship captains.” The long, protected waterway leading from the ocean into the bay allowed small craft to sail out just as far as the ocean to meet larger ships; small news boats would compete with each other in reaching the large cargo ships before they docked at New York.

The shape of Manhattan Island promoted the development of an incredibly dense, congested, and heterogeneous city, and the natural boundaries of the land mass forced settlement into the southernmost tip of the island nearest to the docks. The easy accessibility to water on three fronts made this property the most desirable for any commercial venture, and the lack of efficient land transportation encouraged concentration in this small area. While some immigrant groups settled together to form small neighborhood communities, these were often overlapping and shared, causing a multicultural intermingling that had been previously unknown in Europe. This concentration of difference existed against the conflicting demands of maintaining cultural and ethnic ties and assimilating to a new urban American way of life. This diversity, somewhat paradoxically, was also an advantageous precondition for the growth of a new uniform mode of communication. The newspaper provided the backdrop to “the seemingly Babel-like confusion of languages, world views and moral codes,” that in Rolf Lindner’s analysis helped to “break down prejudices and find a way to a common ‘universe of discourse.'”

In the dense area of lower Manhattan there was no single unifying religion, and little incentive to create one; religion was never an essentializing characteristic of New York. Unlike the other major cities developing in the United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York was always a mercantile, commercial outpost. It did not suffer the religious Puritanism of Boston or Philadelphia because it was settled as a company rather than by religious fervor or nationalist expansion. Commissioned by the Dutch East India Company, the first settlers at New Amsterdam were traders, instructed to open up a new market for what was then one of the largest corporations in the world, and the company practiced religious and cultural tolerance in an attempt to encourage settlement. These early patterns set an enduring precedent for New York; it was, and still is, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, often dominated socially, culturally, and economically—but never numerically—by one group. By 1890, New York “contained more foreign born residents than any city in the world” and “four out of five people living in greater New York in 1890 had either been born abroad or were of foreign parentage.” This unprecedented religious and cultural heterogeneity was a boon to the emerging newspaper industry.

The rise of secularism was both a necessary precursor and a result of the growth of newspapers in the nineteenth century. Although the emergence of the telegraph was largely articulated through the ecclesiastical discourses of electrical transcendence, it was one of the main catalysts of a universalizing, nondenominational, American culture. Foremost among the achievements of the telegraph was the “fostering [of] a national commercial middle class,” which was crucial to the growth of the city and the newspaper. Alongside this new commercial middle class was a belief in the power of the press to cultivate a free flow of information that would end religious, social, and racial prejudice and be the main instrument of democracy in America; these discourses of social progress were as common to the popular conceptions and justifications of the modern newspaper as they were to those of cities.

The new technologies of transportation and communication that emerged during the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for urban life in America. The railroad and the telegraph, perhaps two of the most important advances of the modern period, both bound the nation together and created concentrations of people, wealth, commerce, and industry in burgeoning cities. The telegraph allowed information about goods to travel faster than the goods themselves, creating a new market in commodity speculation that allowed for the collapse of space and time for the purposes of trading, yet also encouraged the development of major hubs of concentrated financial power. As a central node in the telegraph network, New York quickly became one of these concentrations, and newspapers followed this flow of resources to report and document it, capitalizing on the need for better, faster information.

The increased rate of exchange between urban and rural areas that resulted from the expansion of the telegraph meant that the social repercussions within cities, in which huge fortunes were amassed and technological and scientific gains had their vanguard, were felt outside cities as well. No longer were small towns characterized by their own particularities in speech or custom; the mobility that the railway ushered in led to a general blurring of distinctions among the previously separate and isolated areas. While this blurring may be understood to have produced a leveling of culture across the nation, cities quickly and irrevocably took their place above rural areas in the sociocultural hierarchy, establishing a primary position in matters of style and taste that the major urban newspapers were central in validating. Despite the fact that the telegraph made it possible for news to be printed at the same time in small towns as it was in the city, New York newspapers managed to maintain their prominence in the industry by establishing a monopoly over news through press associations like the Associated Press, formed in New York four years after the advent of the telegraph in 1848, which kept nonmembers at their mercy for the most important news. And while information was increasingly traveling between the cities and rural areas, intraurban communication was still problematic. Neither the telegraph nor the railroads were efficient means of communication within cities. Free urban mail delivery was not established in New York until 1863, and the telephone not until 1876. The lack of cohesion among city residents that resulted from these limitations in the communication infrastructure provides some insight into the common characterization of cities as anonymous, unfriendly places, but it was a circumstance that the metropolitan newspaper was largely successful in exploiting and overcoming. The newspaper constructed a new urban community, both literally and figuratively, by promoting the formation of those structural components that constitute the very built environment of the city, making urban development integrally bound to that of the newspaper.

Beginning in the 1830s, a new era in newspaper organization, and what many have referred to as a “new journalism,” was initiated. These early papers, known as the penny press after Benjamin Day’s one-cent experiment with his Sun, represented a break from the old-style partisan press that characterized news of an earlier era. One hundred years after John Peter Zenger’s landmark libel suit led to the establishment of freedom of the press in the First Amendment, it had become both politically possible and economically desirable to publish “news” that was not entirely in the service of a particular party or mercantile interest. Relying on the sale of advertising space rather than party sponsorship or paid subscriptions for financial support, the penny papers began to concern themselves with an agenda not linked to the interests of a particular group, but of the population at large. These new penny papers were sold on the street corner, rather than by subscription, making their focus more local than international and their information temporally specific.

The biggest story of the nineteenth-century metropolitan newspapers was, as Gunther Barth so succinctly put it, life in the big city itself, and the newspapers arranged themselves physically to take the best advantage of this story. Newspapers in New York were concentrated along the short diagonal street facing City Hall known as Park Row in order to be physically close to all of the central features of the city. From City Hall came all of the political news, and a few blocks away Wall Street was the source of financial news. The ports along the East River made shipping and foreign news easily accessible, and the police, and nearby Five Points slum, provided endless fodder for stories of crime, scandal, and injustice. This area had already been established as the center of printing and publishing activity for its easy access to the ship- and railway-supplied paper. In the pretelegraph era, the Sun used horse expresses, trains, and news boats for news gathering to keep a current and steady flow of news coming in. In 1835 it began to use steam power to run its presses, making it possible for a story to go from the streets to the pages within a few hours. The Sun capitalized on the city as its muse, and recognized the potential in rallying a new and growing assortment of readers around the daily occurrences of city life. Day’s Sun sought to break the elitist monopoly on news that had dominated in the previous century by redefining the very concept of news. Although its headlines were small, and the text minute and dense, the early penny papers were indeed more sensational than anything that had come before. Yet for most of its existence, the Sun occupied one of the most unassuming headquarters of any business in the city.

Day began his newspaper in the building that was his printing shop, a small rookery that produced a fittingly small paper. The first penny paper scavenged for news from every available source with a skeleton staff, and it was laid out on a sheet of paper eight by eleven inches. Despite its size and lack of resources, the Sun was a successful experiment in independent news reporting and dissemination. In its second issue, Day ran a want ad that read, “To the Unemployed—a number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again,” establishing the practice of newsboy distribution that would characterize nineteenth-century newspaper sales. The Sun caught and held the attention of New Yorkers with inventiveness and spirit, demonstrated amply in the famous Moon Hoax of 1835, in which it reported in a series of exclusives that a telescope at the Cape of Good Hope had identified a society of fantastical creatures living on the moon.

By the time Charles A. Dana took charge in 1868, after his unceremonious departure from the New-York Tribune and politically opportune wartime post, the Sun was one of the most widely read and well-respected newspapers in the country. The paper came with a readership of tradesmen, small merchants, and mechanics, which Dana aimed to keep after his takeover. In his prospectus for the new paper, Dana boldly stated that “in changing its proprietorship, the Sun will not in any respect change its principles or general line of conduct. It will continue to be an independent newspaper, wearing the livery of no party, and discussing public questions and the acts of public men on their merits alone. It will be guided, as it has been hitherto, by uncompromising loyalty to the Union, and will resist every attempt to weaken the bonds that unite the American people into one nation.”

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Media Capitalby Aurora Wallace Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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