In the old New York Times headquarters, stained-glass panels adorned the editorial offices — and colored the place in more ways than one.
In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum of The Times. Figured glass
“The New York Times is a university — one of the greatest universities in the world — with its doors open to whoso runs and reads at a tuition fee of two cents a day,” The Times declared in 1924 in a booklet called, “The Making of a Great Newspaper.”
The booklet was issued to commemorate the completion of an ambitious expansion and renovation of The Times’s headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street, designed by Ludlow & Peabody. The project included a new suite of offices for members of the editorial board, who wrote the editorials that appeared in the newspaper and, in conjunction with the publisher, set The Times’s editorial policy. (The department is now known as Times Opinion.)
Unlike most other office floors in the building, which were strictly utilitarian, the editorial department was designed with elegant flourishes: clerestory windows with leaded panes and stained-glass panels, ornate column capitals, vaulted ceilings and arched doorways.
The editorial department, the booklet said, was “designed to suggest nothing so much as the studious atmosphere and surroundings of university cloisters — the simple chaste beauty and calm of ancient retreats.”
Transportation and communication were the themes of the stained-glass panels — modern images in a medieval medium. One panel showed a biplane flying through the clouds, over mountains and above a city. Another showed a steamship churning through the waves. In another, a printer is setting newspaper type on a line-casting machine, while a pressman in another panel holds up a freshly printed newspaper. Unfortunately, the booklet did not credit the stained-glass studio.
When The Times left the 43rd Street building in 2007, the fate of the windows was uncertain. Deirdre Deignan, a secretary in the production department, had them moved to The Times’s printing plant in College Point, Queens, where they have been kept safely ever since. Nick D’Andrea Jr., the manager of the plant, lent the window with an image of a biplane to the Museum at The Times, where it is on display.
The Collegiate Gothic aesthetic of the editorial department, never exactly avant-garde, looked increasingly old-fashioned in recent decades. But Gail Collins, who was the editorial page editor from 2001 to 2007, said in an email last week that she liked the space. She was the first woman to lead the department.
“It made me feel as if we were carrying on The Times tradition when we were meeting there,” Ms. Collins wrote. “I know the founders didn’t have editors like me in mind when they put up the windows, but rather than making me feel excluded, it made me feel as if I was part of a new era of leadership teams.”
Home Building Materials David W. Dunlap , a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents. More about David W. Dunlap