Photo: NewYorker.com
The staff of the New York Times, as you may have (repeatedly) heard, is not entirely enamored of the paper’s shiny new building, across Eighth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. (This probably says more about the sorts of conversations we have than about anything else, but we’ve been finding it profoundly odd for the last month or so to no longer be able to use the phrase “43rd Street” to refer to the paper’s headquarters. “Eighth Avenue” just doesn’t work the same way.) People don’t like the elevators, they don’t like the toilets, they don’t like the automated window-shade system, and they don’t like the lights, which sometimes turn off on their own. (They also don’t like the leaks, mice, and maggots, though that displeasure would not be unique to Timespeople.) In today’s new New Yorker, that magazine’s architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, an alumnus of 43rd Street who presumably has listened to his old friends kvetch about their new tower, passes along yet another dissatisfaction with the new workplace:
In a nice, democratic gesture, most of the building’s perimeter has been left open, bringing in lots of natural light, and the private offices for editors all have glass walls facing into the newsroom. One member of the editorial board, who gave up a large, enclosed office in the old building for one of these small fishbowls, growled to me, “There’s no place I can change into a tuxedo.”
God, it’s hard working in the newspaper business these days.
Towers of Babble [NYer]
