Old New York Times Building
I had a peculiar moment, Saturday Night, as I stood with my daughter in law on the 5th story balcony of the American Airlines Theatre, awaiting the call for Mrs. Warren’s Profession with Cherry Jones in the role of Mrs. Warren.
That’s because that balcony faces 43rd street and you get to look right into the building adjacent, the former New York Times building.
It’s basically empty. There is at least one finished apartment/business on a low floor, (We saw a couple of people milling around a huge kitchen space) and another weird apartment that had some kind of light show with city images being projected onto a wall. Otherwise all you see is empty entrails inside cavernous spaces. A bit eerie to look at. All vacant buildings are that way, however lovely.
A huge, beautiful building, though. White with delicate ornamentation on the facade. (We don’t have white buildings in Montreal.)While we were there two men came out and one speculated it was the New York Time Building.
So, just imagine what I would have seen if I had stood on this balcony in 1982, when I visited New York with two friends in my twenties. I would have seen “my future job”… as I was an aspiring journalist writing radio copy at CFCF in Montreal.. I would have witnessed the very opposite of what I witnessed on Saturday. A busy, busy building. An important building. One of the most important buildings in the world.
(Ironically, it was the NYT’s positive review of the play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, that got me to come to New York in the first place. I ignored their negative review of the Lion’s Club Restaurant, and made reservations anyway. And I am glad I did.)
Maybe it’s all a big fat metaphor for the decline of newspaper industry.
CFCF once had huge studios on Ogilvy and now it’s in an office building near Papineau, with one small studio for news. (George Clooney used the old empty studios to film part of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind… I write that because we took a Caleche ride in Central Park the Sunday Morning, and the guide mentioned all the movies filmed in the Park.
I checked on Google. And I read up on Wikipedia. The New York Times Building has been sold, and quickly flipped for a huge profit, but then the crash… Now it may be turned into an hotel. Not sure if it’s right, as I believe the same article says that the building was erected in 1913 (The Tighsolas Era!) but read somewhere else that Time’s Square was re-named in 1904.)
Still, it’s a Tighsolas Era Building. Margaret Nicholson visited New York in 1902, when newspapers were the only news medium, outside of gossip. She was caught in a hail storm on the Brooklyn Bridge. She was impressed by ‘all the tall buildings’. I wonder what she would have thought of Times Square Today. Or all the tall tall tall TALL buildings.
And just this morning I realized (or remembered) that Times Square is named for that building. Duh!!
