City Hall stands in front of Newspaper Row - the former publishing headquarters of The World (left), The Tribune (center) and The Times (right) in downtown Manhattan, circa 1906. Behind the New York Times building is the American Tract Society." 

Benjamin Franklin Statue at Newspaper Row, 1900 

Newspaper row, 1900 

Printing House Square - The Sun; The New York Journal Building; The Tribune; New York Times; The World building; 1868 

Printing House Square 

1899 - Park Row Building (15 Park Row)  First commercial skyscrapers - Park Row Building RH Robertson designed one of the city's first commercial skyscrapers at 391 ft tall, Park Row Building. Two other buildings on Park Row were also part of Newspaper Row but not built specifically for newspapers' use. The Park Row Building, at 15 Park Row, housed the early headquarters of the Associated Press.

2019 - 25 Park Row  A 49-Story Art Deco-inspired tower with 110 residences. Dramatic façade features cascading loggias, Juliet balconies, oversized casement-style windows and fluted columns. Grand curvilinear 24-hour attended lobby features terrazzo flooring with metal trim detail and fluted paneling.

1858 - Harper's Building  The company changed its name to "Harper & Brothers" in 1833. The headquarters of the publishing house were located at 331 Pearl Street, facing Franklin Square in Lower Manhattan (about where the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge lies today). Harper & Brothers began publishing Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1850. The brothers also published Harper's Weekly (starting in 1857), Harper's Bazar (starting in 1867), and Harper's Young People (starting in 1879). George B. M. Harvey became president of Harper's on Nov. 16, 1899. Harper's New Monthly Magazine ultimately became Harper's Magazine, which is now published by the Harper's Magazine Foundation. Harper's Weekly was absorbed by The Independent (New York; later Boston) in 1916, which in turn merged with The Outlook in 1928. Harper's Bazar was sold to William Randolph Hearst in 1913 and is now Bazaar, published by the Hearst Corporation. In 1924, Cass Canfield joined Harper & Brothers and held a variety of executive positions until his death in 1986. In 1925, Eugene F. Saxton joined the company as an editor, and he was responsible for publishing many well-known authors, including Edna St. Vincent Millay and Thornton Wilder. In 1935, Edward Aswell moved to Harper & Brothers as an assistant editor of general books and eventually became editor-in-chief. Aswell persuaded Thomas Wolfe to leave Scribner's, and, after Wolfe's death, edited the posthumous novels The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond. n 1962 Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson & Company to become Harper & Row. Marshall Pickering was bought by Harper and Row in 1988. Marshall Pickering itself was formed in 1981 from two long-established Christian publishers. Marshall Morgan and Scott, a London-based predominantly Baptist publishing house, which had acquired a number of publishing companies over the years, such as Bagsters (Bible publishers since 1794) and Oliphants. Pickering and Inglis was a long established Glasgow-based publisher, publishing largely for the non-conformist church in Scotland with many Brethren publications.. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired Harper & Row in 1987, and William Collins & Sons in 1990. The names of these two national publishing houses (Harper & Row in the United States and Collins in Britain) were combined (along with the Harper's torch icon and Collins' fountain icon) to create HarperCollins, which has since expanded its international reach with further acquisitions of formerly independent publishers. The Harper imprint began being used in place of HarperCollins in 2007. The tensile strength of cast iron ushered in a new style of building in New York, making possible numerous windows and narrow supporting elements. The façade became virtually permeable, with big, inviting display windows that seemed to dissolve the boundary between street and shop. In 1858 architect and inventor James Bogardus, whose name has become synonymous with cast-iron architecture, wrote that he wanted to emulate the “rich architectural designs of antiquity in modern times, by the aid of cast iron.” His best-known structure, the Harper & Brothers building at Franklin Square on Pearl Street, with its Italianate columns and arches, gives the impression of modernity while evoking the legitimacy of the past.

1889 - Old New York Times Building (41 Park Row, Pace University)  The building is the oldest surviving structure of the former "Newspaper Row", and has been owned by and currently houses classrooms and offices of Pace University since 1951. 41 Park Row contains a facade of Maine granite at its lowest two stories, above which are rusticated blocks of Indiana Limestone. Vertical piers on the facade highlight the building's vertical axis. The facade also contains details such as reliefs, moldings, and colonettes. When completed, the building was 13 stories and contained a mansard roof; the roof was removed as part of a later expansion that brought the building to 16 stories. The newspaper's first building was located at 113 Nassau Street in New York City. In 1854, it moved to 138 Nassau Street, and in 1858 to 41 Park Row, making it the first newspaper in New York City housed in a building built specifically for its use. The newspaper moved its headquarters to the Times Tower, located at 1475 Broadway in 1904, in an area then called Longacre Square, that was later renamed Times Square the newspaper's honor. The top of the building – now known as One Times Square – is the site of the New Year's Eve tradition of lowering a lighted ball, which was begun by the paper. The building is also known for its electronic news ticker – popularly known as "The Zipper" – where headlines crawl around the outside of the building. It is still in use but has been operated by Dow Jones & Company since 1995.

1875 - New York Tribune Building  Designed by Richard Morris Hunt who was the 1st American Architect to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (and demolished in 1966), the tallest building in New York at 260 ft. is the New York Tribune Building In 1872 Horace Greeley Defeated as the Presidential Candidate for the Liberal Republican Party was longtime abolitionist, founder, and editor of the New York Tribune.

1882 - Potter Building  The Potter Building was constructed with the most advanced fireproofing technologies available after the building previously on the site burned to the ground. The building replaced a former headquarters of the New York World, which was built in 1857 and burned down in February 1882. It was converted into apartments from 1979 to 1981. In 1886 Norris G. Starkweather incorporated the most advanced fireproofing methods at the time including 40" thick brick walls and cast iron construction for the Potter Building. Two other buildings on Park Row were also part of Newspaper Row but not built specifically for newspapers' use. The Potter Building, at 38 Park Row, contained tenants such as The Press, a Republican Party-affiliated penny paper, as well as The New York Observer.

1890 - New York World Building  As evidence of just how important Newspaper Row was at the time, The New York World Building was the first building in the city to surpass the height of Trinity Church. Furthermore, it was the world’s tallest building from 1890 to 1894. The 309-foot, 16-story building at 99 Park Row was capped by a copper dome and inside Joseph Pulitzer had his office. The semi-circular office had three windows with unobstructed views out to Brooklyn, Governor’s Island, and Long Island, ceiling frescoes and embossed leather lining the walls. Also in the dome was another office for Pulitzer’s brother-in-law, a library and a conference room. Unsurprisingly, The New York World heralded its own building as “The Greatest Newspaper Building in the World.” The New York World Building would be demolished in 1955 to accommodate ramp expansion at the Brooklyn Bridge. The stained glass window which was once above the entrance is now in the Columbia University School of Journalism. The New York Sun was next door and was dwarfed by the new building. Charles Dana, head of the Sun who had lost public favor due to his conservatism and anti-Semitism, criticized The New York World Building for looking like a large brass head tack. A 1904 guidebook notes the Sun Building as being the former home of the Tammany Society and was a building “of no architectural pretensions.” George B. Post designed the steel-frame building, with an exterior of sandstone, brick and terra-cotta. The entire thing was paid for in cash. The newspapers were printed in the basement printing press, with retail on the first and mezzanine floors. The news offices were on the top six floors, with commercial office space rented to other tenants below. According to the book Pulitzer: A Life by Denis Brian, Pulitzer furnished bedrooms on the 11th floor for editors and reporters who worked late and couldn’t get home. At the opening celebration, an explosion caused by a photographer’s flash powder caused a big stone to fall from City Hall and broke around fifty windows in city’s political home.

1906 - Former New York Evening Post Building  Inspired by Vienna Secession, this 13-story limestone commercial building was built as a publishing house the the New York Evening Post. Estelle Rombold-Kohn and Gutzon Borglum sculpted the "Four Periods of Publicity" on the facade. 1907 The New York Evening Post moved into Architect Robert D. Kohn's Art Nouveau designed offices and printing plant; Gutzon Borglum who became famous for his work on Mt Rushmore sculpted two of the rooftop statues: the Four Periods of Publicity The Old New York Evening Post Building is the former office and printing plant of the New York Evening Post newspaper located at 20 Vesey Street between Church Street and Broadway in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1906-07 and was designed by architect Robert D. Kohn for Oswald Garrison Villard, who owned the Post at the time, and is considered to be "one of the few outstanding Art nouveau buildings" ever constructed in the United States. The fourteen-story, stone-veneer building is "reminiscent of the buildings that line the boulevards of Paris", and was not copied from an existing building. It features three tall bays of cast-iron framed bow windows, separated by pale limestone piers. There is an elaborate copper-covered mansard roof, two stories high and four elaborate sculpted figures. The building, which was later called the Garrison Building, was designated a New York City landmark in 1965, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. The New York Landmarks Preservation Commission was headquartered in the building from 1980 to 1987. 1725 New York Gazette at, 51 Pearl Street was the 1st newspaper printed in New York by William Bradford. The Gazette ceased publication November 1744 upon Bradford's retirement. Henry De Forest had been co-publishing the paper in its later years with Bradford, and he continued a paper under the title New-York Evening Post, which likely lasted until late 1752 or early 1753 (and is no relation to the current New York Post founded in 1801). Though it was first, it was not distinguished. Historian Frank Luther Mott has described the paper as a "small two-page paper, poorly printed, and containing chiefly foreign news from three to six months old, state papers, lists of ships entered and cleared, and a few advertisements." Bradford had been a printer in Philadelphia, and he was induced to move to New York in 1693 to become the public printer. He was in his 60s when he first issued the weekly Gazette in early November 1725, and he supported the provincial governor William Cosby upon which his livelihood depended. Public discontent with some of Cosby's actions (which the Gazette would not touch) led to the founding of a second newspaper in the province in 1733, The New York Weekly Journal.

1897 - Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus  On Sept 21, an editorial in the NY Sun assures letter writer 8-year old Virginia O'Hanlon that there is a Santa Claus. "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" is a line from an editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church called "Is There a Santa Claus?" which appeared in The Sun on September 21, 1897, and became one of the most famous editorials ever published. Written in response to a letter by eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon asking whether Santa Claus was real, the editorial was initially published anonymously, and Church's authorship was not disclosed until his 1906 death. The Sun gradually accepted its popularity and republished it during the Christmas season every year from 1924 to 1950, when the paper ceased publication. "Is There a Santa Claus?" is commonly reprinted during the Christmas and holiday season, and has been cited as the most reprinted newspaper editorial in the English language. It has been translated into around 20 languages, and adapted as a film, television presentations, a musical, and a cantata.

1833 - NY Sun started  Sold by newsboys hawking it on the street, the small format paper with stories devoted to local news, crime, scandal, and other topics of human interest, it soon had the largest circulation in the world The Sun first gained notice for its central role in the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a fabricated story of life and civilization on the Moon which the paper falsely attributed to British astronomer John Herschel and never retracted. On April 13, 1844, The Sun published as factual a story by Edgar Allan Poe now known as "The Balloon-Hoax", retracted two days after publication. The story told of an imagined Atlantic crossing by hot-air balloon. Today, the paper is best known for the 1897 editorial "Is There a Santa Claus?" (commonly referred to as "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus"), written by Francis Pharcellus Church. John B. Bogart, city editor of The Sun between 1873 and 1890, made what is perhaps the most frequently quoted definition of the journalistic endeavor: "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." (The quotation is frequently attributed to Charles Dana, The Sun editor and part-owner between 1868 and his death in 1897.) In 1926, The Sun published a review by John Grierson of Robert Flaherty's film Moana, in which Grierson said the film had "documentary value." This is considered the origin of the term "documentary film" The newspaper's editorial cartoonist, Rube Goldberg, received the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his cartoon, "Peace Today". In 1949, The Sun won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for a groundbreaking series of articles by Malcolm Johnson, "Crime on the Waterfront". The series served as the basis for the 1954 movie On the Waterfront. The Sun's first female reporter was Emily Verdery Bettey, hired in 1868. Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd was hired as a reporter and fashion editor in the 1880s; she was one of the first women to become a professional editor, and perhaps the first full-time fashion editor in American newspaper history.

1833 - Newsies on Park Row  In 1833, Sun publisher Benjamin Day ran a Help-Wanted advertisement, looking for adults to help expand circulation. “To the unemployed — A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy and sell again“. To Day’s surprise, his ad didn’t produce adult applicants as expected. Instead, the notice attracted children.
Benjamin Day’s first newspaper “hawker” was Bernard Flaherty, a ten-year-old Irish immigrant. The kid was good at it too, crying out lurid headlines, to passers-by: “Double Distilled Villainy!” “Cursed Effects of Drunkenness!” “Awful Occurrence!” “Infamous Affair!” “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Hordes of street urchins swarmed the tenements and alleyways of American cities. During the 1870s, homeless children were estimated at 20,000 – 30,000 in New York alone, as much as 12% of school-age children in the city.

1882 - New York Journal founded and burned  William Randolph Hearst purchased the NY Journal which began publishing sensational crime and sex stories as he built his newspaper chain rivalling Pulitzers in 1895. The beginning of 'Yellow Journalism' - The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically to this period. It was renamed in 1882 (as New York Morning Journal), 1895 (as The Journal), 1896 (New York Evening Journal), 1901 (as New York (Morning) American), 1937 (merger). The Evening Journal was home to famed investigative reporter Nellie Bly, who began writing for the paper in 1914 as a war correspondent from the battlefields of World War I. Bly eventually returned to the United States and was given her own column that she wrote right up until her death in 1922.

1834 - Currier and Ives founded  A successful American printmaking firm based in New York City from 1835 to 1907 headed first by Nathaniel Currier, and later jointly with his partner James Merritt Ives. The prolific firm produced prints from paintings by fine artists as black and white lithographs that were hand colored. Lithographic prints could be reproduced quickly and purchased inexpensively, and the firm called itself "the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints" and advertised its lithographs as "colored engravings for the people". The firm adopted the name "Currier and Ives" in 1857.

1834 - New Yorker Staats-Zeitung founded  The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, nicknamed "The Staats", claims to be the leading German-language weekly newspaper in the United States and is one of the oldest, having been published since the mid-1830s. In the late 19th century, it was one of New York City's major daily newspapers, exceeded in circulation only by the New York World and the New-York Tribune. Among other achievements, as of its sesquicentennial anniversary in 1984 it had never missed a publication date, thereby laying claim to the title of being continuously published longer than any other newspaper (of any language) in America.

1868 - The Revolution started  A Newspaper established by women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in NYC was titled The Revolution. It was published weekly between January 8, 1868 and February 17, 1872. With a combative style that matched its name, it primarily focused on women's rights, especially prohibiting discrimination against women voting, women's suffrage. It also covered other topics, however, such as politics, the labor movement and finance. Anthony managed the business aspects of the paper while Stanton was co-editor along with Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and a supporter of women's rights. Initial funding was provided by George Francis Train, a controversial businessman who supported women's rights but alienated many activists with his views on politics and race. The funding that he arranged was enough to start the newspaper but not enough to sustain it. After twenty-nine months, mounting debts forced Anthony to transfer the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard, a wealthy women's rights activist who gave it a less radical tone. The paper published its last issue less than two years later.

1845 - Publication of Scientific American  Scientific American (informally abbreviated SciAm or sometimes SA) is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein, have contributed articles to it. It is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States (though it only became monthly in 1921).

1884 - Linotype Machine invented  New York Tribune used a new type of press for the 1st time to print its newspaper invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler In 1876, a German clock maker, Ottmar Mergenthaler, who had emigrated to the United States in 1872, was approached by James O. Clephane and his associate Charles T. Moore, who sought a quicker way of publishing legal briefs. By 1884, he conceived the idea of assembling metallic letter molds, called matrices, and casting molten metal into them, all within a single machine. His first attempt proved the idea feasible and a new company was formed. Improving his invention, Mergenthaler further developed his idea of an independent matrix machine. In July, 1886, the first commercially used Linotype was installed in the printing office of the New York Tribune. Here, it was immediately used on the daily paper and a large book. The book, the first ever composed with the new Linotype method, was titled, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports.

1877 - Invention of the Phonograph  Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound.

1882 - New York World Building fire 1883  A fire broke out in the World building around 10:00 p.m. on January 31, 1882, supposedly because of a draft of wind from the nearby Temple Court Building. The fire destroyed much of the block within a few hours, killing six people and causing more than $400,000 in damage (equivalent to $11 million in 2020). The World building was said to have "made itself notorious the country over for burning up in the shortest time on record", and it took a week to examine the wreckage, Several days after the fire, the Real Estate Record and Guide said that "the ground is so valuable that it will no doubt be immediately built upon".

1734 - John Peter Zenger's Sedition Trial  John Peter Zenger was a German printer and journalist in New York City. Zenger printed The New York Weekly Journal. He was accused of libel in 1734 by William Cosby, the royal governor of New York, but the jury acquitted Zenger, who became a symbol for freedom of the press. In 1733, Zenger began printing The New York Weekly Journal, which voiced opinions critical of the colonial governor, William Cosby. On November 17, 1734, on Cosby's orders, the sheriff arrested Zenger. After a grand jury refused to indict him, the Attorney General Richard Bradley charged him with libel in August 1735. Zenger's lawyers, Andrew Hamilton and William Smith, Sr., successfully argued that truth is a defense against charges of libel. John Peter Zenger trial would lead the way for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, which reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

1890 - Horace Greeley Statue (City Hall Park)  This statue commemorates Horace Greeley, longtime editor of the Tribune. The pedestal upon which the statue rests was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Greeley established the New York Tribune in efforts to promote the Whig and Republican parties as well as opposition to slavery. In the 1872 presidential election, he was the candidate for the Liberal Republican party.

1872 - Benjamin Franklin statue at Pace Plaza  This sculptural portrait of Franklin was commissioned as a gift to the City by Albert De Groot, a retired Hudson Valley steamboat captain. Park Row was for decades the center of New York’s publishing industry and newspaper businesses, and given Franklin’s activities as a printer of paper currency and publisher of newspapers and almanacs, the choice of location was particularly apt. DeGroot had earlier collaborated with Plassman on the creation of the Cornelius Vanderbilt statue (1869), which stands in the viaduct in front of Grand Central Terminal. This colossal bronze effigy depicts Franklin in 18th-century dress, holding a copy of the Philadelphia Gazette. A second casting may be viewed in the lobby of the High School of Graphic Communication Arts at 439 West 49th Street. On January 17, 1872, the 166th anniversary of Franklin’s birth, the statue was formally unveiled in a lavish ceremony in which artist and inventor Samuel F. Morse removed the shroud and newspaper publisher Horace Greeley delivered the keynote address. Charles C. Savage, speaking on behalf of the New York Typographical Society, commented: “It is appropriate that this statue should be erected in this centre of our trade, in the very midst of our craft-work, instead of in Central Park; for Franklin’s life was devoted to practical hard work, rather than to the ornamental and the recreative.” Today the sculpture stands in a small triangle, with Pace University as its backdrop. Having suffered from environmental corrosion, the statue was treated and restored by the Parks’ monuments crew on four occasions between the 1940s and the 1980s. In 1999 the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program, with funding from the Florence Gould Foundation, American Express Company, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation, conducted a complete conservation of the statue and its large granite pedestal. Today this portrait of an American icon, with renewed luster, maintains his watchful gaze over this crossroads of civic life. Ernest Plassman's sculpture was unveiled in an elaborate ceremony with more than 20,000 people with Samuel Morse presiding. He caught pneumonia and died shortly afterward.

1954 - Joseph Pulitzer plaque  Joseph Pulitzer was a newspaper publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. He became a leading national figure in the Democratic Party and was elected congressman from New York. He crusaded against big business and corruption and helped keep the Statue of Liberty in New York. In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime, and graphic horrors. The wide appeal reached a million copies a day and opened the way to mass-circulation newspapers that depended on advertising revenue (rather than cover price or political party subsidies) and appealed to readers with multiple forms of news, gossip, entertainment, and advertising. Today, his name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, which were established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to Columbia University. The prizes are given annually to recognize and reward excellence in American journalism, photography, literature, history, poetry, music, and drama. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism by his philanthropic bequest; it opened in 1912. Quote on the Tablet on plinth: Near this spot stood the New York World Building whose Publisher Joseph Pulitzer upheld the Highest traditions of American Journalism. An Immigrant he rose to fame and fortune and never in the process lost the common touch. 1954.