page_title: New York Times Building (41 Park Row)
section_title: Previous buildings
hierarchical_section_title: New York Times Building (41 Park Row) / History / Previous buildings
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Bill, Charles K.: Das Times Gebäude
context_page_description: The New York Times Building, also known as 41 Park Row and 147 Nassau Street, is an office building in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, across from City Hall and the Civic Center. It occupies a plot abutting Nassau Street to the east, Spruce Street to the north, and Park Row to the west. The building is the oldest surviving structure of the former "Newspaper Row", and is owned by Pace University.
  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 New York Times constructed the previous five-story building at 41 Park Row between 1857 and 1858, replacing two previous quarters that it had occupied since its 1851 founding. That building was replaced in 1889 as a Romanesque Revival structure by George B.
context_section_description: The Times, founded in 1851, was first located in 113 Nassau Street, one block south of 41 Park Row; it moved to 138 Nassau Street, the site of the current Potter Building in 1854. The Times grew quickly and by 1856, it needed new quarters. The Times had become popular, with over twice the readership of the competing Tribune by 1855, and was described in Harper's Weekly as having "won a reputation for the fulness [sic] and variety of its news". When Brick Presbyterian Church's congregation moved uptown to Murray Hill in 1857. Times cofounder Edward B. Wesley partnered with investors Frederick P. James and Henry Keep to buy the northern half of the church site for its third building. The newspaper's other cofounders, Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, subsequently bought James's and Keep's shares. Thomas R. Jackson designed a five-story building in the Romanesque Revival style at the site, with the address 41 Park Row.
  The third building's cornerstone was laid in May 1857. When the Times moved into the building in 1858, it became the first newspaper in New York City housed in a building erected specifically for its use. The 1851 building, dwarfing that of the Tribune, was described by the Times in 2001 as "a declaration that the newspaper regarded itself as a powerful institution in civic life". The structure had arched brick floors set within iron girders. The Times had printing presses and stereotype machines in the basement; publication offices on the first floor; its editorial department and reporters on the fourth floor; and a composing room on the first floor. Tenants rented space on the second and third floors. After Raymond died in 1869, Edwin B. Morgan, then a minority stakeholder, acquired Raymond's shares. Morgan had bought a neighboring building, owned by Western Union, two years earlier. Both buildings were given to the Times's stock association in 1881 following Morgan's death. The old Times Building's publication office was expanded in 1873. Following the burning of the old New York World Building to the south in 1882 (later to be occupied by the Potter Building), the Times temporarily relocated to an office on Broadway.
  By the mid-1880s, the Times's operations had grown significantly and the rental market in the neighborhood was strong. The Real Estate Record and Guide stated in 1882 that the Tribune, Times, Morse, and Temple Court buildings were close to the courts of the Civic Center, making these buildings ideal for lawyers. Because of the demand for office space, Jones and the Times's other owners proposed erecting a taller building on the site of the Times headquarters, rather than look for another site in Lower Manhattan, where available land was scarce. Furthermore, it would be extremely difficult to move the Times's printing presses to a temporary location, so such a building would have to be built while the existing structure kept operating. Some 300 people were working in the old building at the time of the project's announcement.
caption: First building at 41 Park Row, 1874
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