Construction
of this Times Building started on May, 1857, and it opened 12 months later, in
May, 1858. It was the third home of The New York Times, originally The
New-York Daily Times. The first home was at
113 Nassau Street
and the second at
138 Nassau Street.
In 1877, Times Building also housed the Patent Office, O Novo Mundo, the George P. Powell & Co. 's American Newspaper Advertising Agency and others. The building was reconstructed in 1888 to a new 13-story early skyscraper.
The engraving above illustrates the article "The Metropolitan Newspaper", here some part of it:
«After a midnight walk down Broadway, a few months ago, two gentlemen crossed the breezy interspace of City Hall Park as the yellow disk of the illuminated clock in the tower marked one. A few outcasts were asleep on the benches; the foliage swayed, and broke the rays of the lamps into an irregular flicker; the high dark buildings on the Broadway side rose massively, like the embattlements of a fortress, but on the other side several of the larger buildings were luminous in the upper stories, which seemed like rows of lamps hanging in the air.
These were the offices of the great morning newspapers, which are concentrated within an eighth of a mile, and the animation glowing in them brought Warrington's apostrophe to the mind of one of the gentlemen, who repeated it to his companion.
Clustered among scores of other publishing offices, loomed the the buildings of the Tribune, the Herald, the Sun, the World, and the Times, white wreaths of steam rolling up from their roofs and from the gratings over the press-rooms. The press-rooms extended beyond the buildings under the sidewalk, and the pavement vibrated with the beat of the machines, which were already tossing off parts of the papers, the insides or the outsides, leaving a reserve of space for the news that might arrive afterward. Where the heat had penetrated the hard flags, some newsboys had curled themselves in innocence and dirt. Others lay asleep on the steps, where the most important and most hurried of the larger contributors to journalism kindly forbore from disturbing them. Occasionally a telegraph messenger dived into the entrance of a building, then an errand-boy from the post-office with a pile of newspapers and letters, and then a reporter from some late meeting up town. As a matter of appearance more than any thing else — as the last "form" admitting advertisements had long since closed — a clerk sat in the advertising office, on the ground-floor, and drowsed, with the lights half down.
The two gentlemen entered one of the offices, and began to ascend that long stairway by which all editorial rooms are attained, custom and economy invariably putting editors in a garret, whence they may look down, physically and mentally, on the world they write about. More telegraph boys, compositors, proof-readers, and reporters passed the visitors on the stairs, who, when they had explained their business to an inky office-boy, were admitted into the sanctum sanctorum of a celebrated morning paper.»
