History of the Linotype Company

13. Mergenthaler Offices and Factories

247 MERGENTHALER OFFICES AND FACTORIES 13 OTTMAR MERGENTHALER’S BALTIMORE FACTORIES Mergenthaler opened his first machine shop in Baltimore in 1883 and developed the prototype for his first mechanized typesetting machine on Bank Lane in a block now bounded by Charles, Baltimore, St. Paul, and Redwood Streets. Today, the site lies beneath the Blaustein Building, 1 N. Charles Street. A plaque noting the site is affixed to the building’s south wall. When he outgrew the Bank Lane building, in 1885 Mergenthaler moved to a new shop at 201 Camden St. The site of that shop, the corner of Camden and S. Howard Streets, is now in the center of Baltimore’s tourist district, between the Convention Center and the Maryland Sports Museum (itself in the former Camden train station building). In 1887 Ott. Mergenthaler & Co. was located at Clagett and Allen Streets, Locust Point in the former Walker Horseshoe Factory. Detail of a map of downtown Baltimore in the 1970s. Bank Lane, where Mergenthaler opened his first machine shop and developed the prototype for his first mechanized typesetting machine, can be seen just below the Post Office. Above: Mergenthaler’s original shop in downtown Baltimore in 1878, and a view of the street as it is now. Below: Ottmar’s original Baltimore factory, built when he started his own company. 248 BROOKLYN The animosity between Whitelaw Reid and Ottmar Mergenthaler centered around Reid’s insistence on moving the factory to New York. As a result, U.S. Linotype production was concentrated in Brooklyn. The first factory was built in 1888 at 29 Ryerson Street. An eight-story addition completed in 1920 provided more work space for the company’s 3,200 employees and permitted the corporate headquarters to be moved from its long-time location in the Tribune Building at 154 Printing House Square on Nassau and Spruce Streets in Manhattan. From 1888 the Mergenthaler Brooklyn factory grew. Eventually the factory occupied the entire square block from Park Avenue to Myrtle Avenue and from Ryerson Street to Hall Street. The block from Ryerson Street to Grand Avenue became the matrix manufacturing plant and the home office. By 1930 the Brooklyn factory was large enough and the demand high enough to permit production of one million matrices every week. In the early 1940s, Linotype production slowed with shifts to production of war matériel. After the war, production increased significantly. The small building at the far right corner of the complex was torn down and later became the plant for government contract work. Ground was broken in 1940, and part of the building was occupied at the end of the year, but the entire complex was not finished until the start of 1942. The factory was only a few blocks from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and conveniently close to the docks from which Linotype machines and matrices were shipped around the world. In November 1958 the Mergenthaler Linotype Company sold the one-square-block machine manufacturing plant it started on Ryerson Street. It set up new plants in Wellsboro, PA, for the production of phototypesetting machines and in Plainview, Nassau County on Long Island, for the production of Linotype machines and offset presses. In the old building stood a museum of sorts, old typesetting machines of one manufacturer or This view, around 1920, shows the size of the Brooklyn manufacturing facility; the East River is in the background. The arrow shows the building that was torn down and later became the plant for government contract work. It was built in 1940. It was, and still is, a rather drab, rundown industrial complex. Left: Pages from the Linotype Milestones booklet, which documented all the machines in the Linotype museum. The company never tired of telling and re-telling the story of the evolution of machine typesetting. The museum that it maintained in Brooklyn until the 1950s was also called “Milestones.” Right: Linotype’s “Milestones” museum in Brooklyn. 249 policy, and a plan for assisting its employees to purchase houses. However, there was one very big issue: very few restrooms. Everyone on the fourth and sixth floors had to go to the fifth floor to find one. The neighborhood was made up of large industrial buildings with almost no open space. There were few restaurants and virtually no parking. On Waverly Avenue toward Myrtle Avenue was a tannery school— from the sidewalk outside the building you could smell the leather and...