Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City

4. Art Deco News

= four Art Deco News This newspaper always will be fearless and independent. It will have no entangling alliance with any class whatever—for class feeling is always antagonistic to the interest of the whole people. —Joseph Medill Patterson, June 26, 1919, from the Daily News’s first editorial and engraved on a wall of the building at 220 East 42nd Street On April 9, 1921, a wake for the Herald Building at Broadway and 34th Street featured Evelyn Scotney of the Metropolitan Opera Company singing “Auld Lang Syne.” The Stanford White structure, modeled after the Loggia of the Palazzo del Consiglio in Verona and one of the few exceptions to the rule that media buildings rise as tall as the law and gravity allowed, was now at risk of becoming an old acquaintance never brought to mind.1 Postcard of lobby and globe in the Daily News Building, ca. 1930. (Author’s collection) Wallace_Media text.indd 89 8/24/12 2:49 PM The operatic farewell was a fitting tribute to the solemn event that marked the end of the august independence of the New York Herald. Following the death of James Gordon Bennett Jr. a year earlier, Frank Munsey, by then an inveterate newspaper consolidator, brought the Herald into the fold of papers that included the New York Sun, the New York Press and the New York Evening Telegram, signaling yet another episode in the ongoing crisis of the press.2 The Reid family, owners of the New-York Tribune, would in short order purchase the Herald and merge it with their paper. The Rogers Peet Company, specializing in boy’s and men’s clothing, took over the Herald building for use as retail space, remodeling the inside but leaving the exterior intact, and the new company used the large street-level windows that once displayed the presses for the presentation of suits. That the orderly and staid Herald had given way to a consumer showroom was a shift already embraced by the upstart Daily News across town, evidenced by the fact that in the same month Macy’s finally relented and began advertising in the new tabloid.3 Macy’s had enjoyed a long and prosperous connection with the Herald across 34th Street, so this decision was a significant precursor of what was to come. Many of the more established businesses had kept their distance from the tabloids, fearing that their readers lacked the resources to shop or that having them in their stores might drive others away.The News’s own research department showed the folly of this thinking in their long-running campaign to “Tell It to Sweeney; The Stuyvesants Will Understand” that ran in Editor & Publisher and Printer’s Ink.4 “Sweeney” was the paper’s shorthand for describing the ordinary city folk that other papers had largely ignored—discovered as the result of a remarkably thorough market research campaign in which Sinclair Dakin had found that the residents of New York’s Lower East Side had greater margins of disposable income than many middle-class citizens and were avid consumers who embracedAmerican brands as vehicles for assimilation.What looked to be insular immigrant communities from the outside turned out to be vibrant social networks eager to adopt the food, clothes, and habits of American life. As Dakin wrote, they wanted “grapefruit for breakfast, their own homes, a little car, money in the bank and a better future for the Sweeney juniors.”5 The News would cater to this new market with an approach that embraced the populist spirit better than any previous newspaper had, and was rewarded with the fierce loyalty of readers. The paper was designed to attract and keep the attention of these readers by making them the subject of its news. The News provided crime, sports, 90 / chapter four Wallace_Media text.indd 90 8/24/12 2:49 PM and entertainment where the other papers focused on the market, finance, and politics. Its publisher, Joseph Medill Patterson, of the wealthy Chicago family that owned the Chicago Tribune, considered himself such an Everyman . Patterson, a former socialist, preferred the company of cab drivers to CEOs, was an avid filmgoer, and shunned vests and ties in the office.6 In a publisher statement to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the new tabloid was described as having been “modeled upon the lines of the highly successful illustrated dailies of London,” specifically the...