BUILDING HISTORY
"Home of the Colored American."
Colored American Magazine, 1902
Colored American Magazine, 1902
All architecture "communicates," so it makes sense that media outlets have sought to utilize the built environment as an extension of their editorial and ideological ambitions. From the earliest days of the American press, newspapers and magazines have incorporated their offices into broader messaging about civic ideals, corporate responsibility, and publishing power.
For confirmation of this relationship, we can look to events such as the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, which included a pavilion dedicated to America's reputation as "a nation of newspaper readers." Inside, visitors could view files of individual publications that provided "tangible evidence of the immensity of the newspaper and periodical interests of our country."
For confirmation of this relationship, we can look to events such as the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, which included a pavilion dedicated to America's reputation as "a nation of newspaper readers." Inside, visitors could view files of individual publications that provided "tangible evidence of the immensity of the newspaper and periodical interests of our country."
Newspaper pavilion, 1876 Philadelphia Exposition
In a catalog which accompanied the exhibit, it is striking how many newspaper buildings are pictured alongside historical sketches of individual publications. Take, for example, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, with the newspaper's imposing headquarters seen as evidence of its standing among the nation's "great papers." Or, the Boston Daily Advertiser, with its "handsome" and "inviting" building celebrated as a testament to its reputation as one of the nation's pre-eminent democratic institutions.
Individual newspaper and magazine buildings, like the publications they housed, often appeared to be in competition with one another. Yet at the same time, the convergence of press buildings in key spaces helped to map and remap media geographies, placing the press in conversation with other landmark civic, transport, and political institutions. Perhaps the most prominent example of this trend is the development of Park Row in New York City, also known as Newspaper Row. From the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century, this site was the national epicenter for print journalism.
Taking advantage of their growing economic and cultural influence, and providing a means of further expanding that influence, publications such as the Times, Tribune, and World constructed new skyscrapers that reshaped the city's skyline. Reflecting the transition of communicative power from the first to the fourth estate, the World's headquarters became the first building in the city to stand taller than Trinity Church.
Taking advantage of their growing economic and cultural influence, and providing a means of further expanding that influence, publications such as the Times, Tribune, and World constructed new skyscrapers that reshaped the city's skyline. Reflecting the transition of communicative power from the first to the fourth estate, the World's headquarters became the first building in the city to stand taller than Trinity Church.
Newspaper Row, New York. Library of Congress, c1900
Efforts to construct increasingly impressive newspaper buildings attracted international attention, with the architectural competition to design a new site for the Chicago Tribune during the early 1920s descibed by Leo Shaw as a defining moment in modern architectural history that left a "global influence on the future of the field." More than 250 architects from some two-dozen countries took up the Tribune's challenge to design "the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world." The winning design, a neo-Gothic skyscraper created by New York-based architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, was championed as "at once a monument to the Tribune's ideals and a 'glory' to journalism."
Tribune Tower. Chicago Tribune
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We can also see how the design of media buildings shifted over time, in tandem with the evolution of attitudes towards, and the role of, the media itself.
In the architectural arms race between New York's major newspapers which took place along Park Row, buildings were designed to emphasize "stability, strength, fortitude, and permanence." More recently, the construction of media edifices such as the New York Times skyscraper in midtown Manhattan have emphasized transparency and adaptability - a clear commentary on challenges to the role of American news outlets and the publishing industries during the early decades of the twenty-first century. |
New York Times building. Wikimedia
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In the same way that "mainstream" (read: white) media outlets have utilized their buildings as a form of editorial shorthand - as a "hook on which to hang some news about the media itself" - so too have publications geared towards Black audiences - within and beyond the United States - used their buildings to push back against racist media depictions of Black life, promote racial pride, solidarity and community interests, and foster the development of Black public spheres.
Christian Recorder building. Accessible Archives
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The precarity of early Black publications can be seen through the marginal spaces they occupied, with pioneering Black media enterprises such as Freedom's Journal, founded in 1827, frequently blurring the lines between domestic and professional space.
For many early Black publications, simply taking up space was a cause for celebration. When the Christian Recorder moved into a new home at 631 Pine Street in Philadelphia shortly after the end of the Civil War, the purchase was held up as evidence of its legitimacy as a Black print enterprise. Control over a physical plant, no matter how small, provided visible evidence of a publication's commitment to Black readers. While such sites were overshadowed by media edifices such as the Times or Tribune buildings on New York's Park Row, they nevertheless loomed larged in the minds of Black readers. |
More broadly, Black publications and the people who made them came to understand the important connection between physical space and editorial message. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Black media buildings were not simply testaments to the power of the Black press, but had come to function as highly visible extensions of individual and collective ideologies.
For Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott, his paper's origins at the kitchen table of his landlady's apartment in 1905 played a critical role in establishing its reputation as a "community" paper and a publication that was rooted in, and beholden to, the Black community. Fifteen years later, the Defender's move to a new location with its own printing press paralleled its increasingly national orientation and self-expressed identity as "the world's greatest weekly." By the interwar years, a period often described as part of the Black press's "golden age" by media historians, the offices of Black newspaper and magazine such as the Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-American had become major cultural and political landmarks which stood as concrete reminders of Black America's ability to "succeed against the odds."
For Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott, his paper's origins at the kitchen table of his landlady's apartment in 1905 played a critical role in establishing its reputation as a "community" paper and a publication that was rooted in, and beholden to, the Black community. Fifteen years later, the Defender's move to a new location with its own printing press paralleled its increasingly national orientation and self-expressed identity as "the world's greatest weekly." By the interwar years, a period often described as part of the Black press's "golden age" by media historians, the offices of Black newspaper and magazine such as the Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-American had become major cultural and political landmarks which stood as concrete reminders of Black America's ability to "succeed against the odds."
Perhaps no building embodies this aspiration more explicitly that the custom-built corporate headquarters of Johnson Publishing Company, which was opened on the Chicago South Loop during the early 1970s. Two decades earlier, when publisher John H. Johnson had sought a new home for his fledgling enterprise, he was forced to diguise himself as a janitor to complete the purchase. For Johnson, the unveiling of 820 South Michigan Avenue was not just proof of his own dramatic rise to a position as the nation's most powerful Black media entrepreneur, but of the gains made by Black people - in the United States and across the diaspora - during the decades following World War II.
Johnson Publishing building. John H. White, DOCUMERICA, 1973
SOURCES:
- Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford, 2015).
- Johnson, John H. with Lerone Bennett Jr. Succeeding Against the Odds (Amistad, 1989).
- Shaw, Leo. "How Chicago’s Tribune Tower Competition Changed Architecture Forever," ArchDaily, October 3, 2017.
- Solomonson, Katherine. The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (Chicago, 2003).
- Wallace, Aurora. Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City (Illinois, 2012).
- West, E. James. A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (Illinois, 2022).