Cleartime: AP's History of Headquarters Moves

450 West 33rd Street is the sixth New York headquarters site for the news cooperative

By Jerry Schwartz
National Writer

Photos of the new space

For an organization that roams the globe, The Associated Press doesn't get around much -- its new headquarters, on Manhattan's West Side, is just the sixth place the news service has hung its slouch hat in the past 156 years.

All have been in Manhattan. The newest, at 450 W. 33rd St., was built in 1967; with nearly 300,000 feet on three floors, it is far larger than any of the AP's former offices.

Of those old haunts, only two survive -- and one is 50 Rockefeller Plaza, which had been home to the AP from 1938 until August 2004. The others are the stuff of urban archaeology, stopping posts along a trail that brought the AP to world prominence.

The first was opened in 1848 by Dr. Alexander Jones, the AP's original general agent. The entire staff consisted of Jones and one assistant; together, they collected news by telegraph to distribute to eight newspapers.

In the summer of 1848, according to Oliver Gramling's "The Story of News," Jones opened a "simple office at the top of a long, dim flight of 78 stairs" at 150 Broadway, the northeast corner of Liberty Street -- a lower Manhattan block from what would later be the site of the World Trade Center.

An engraving from the time depicts a spartan, tall-ceilinged barn of a room, with hanging fans and lamps over the tables that served as desks. The offices were described as large, dingy and carpetless; errand boys carried messages from Jersey City, the terminus of the telegraph lines.

The headquarters remained there until 1875. The building is long gone; the Westinghouse Building was erected on that spot in the 1930s, and manager Joseph Jerome was surprised to learn that the AP had ever lived there.

"Do they owe me any money?" he asked.

Probably not. Besides, Jones paid less than $500 in annual rent in 1848.

"I'll waive that," Jerome said, magnanimously.

The young cooperative did not move far. The second headquarters was located two blocks north, at 195 Broadway, on the eighth floor of a new building that had been constructed by Western Union. This was no doubt a convenience -- the AP was a major customer of Western Union's, so much so that Congress accused the two organizations of creating a "press monopoly."

To judge from pictures from the time, these were nicer digs, with lower ceilings and late-Victorian furniture. But also judging from those pictures, the same mustachioed white guys in formal suits worked there.

The AP moved again in 1913 -- 10 years before the Western Union building came down, to be replaced by the AT&T Building, still an architectural treasure with more classical columns than any building in the world.

But again, the AP didn't move far. You need only walk 6? blocks -- past the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest building when it rewrote the skyline in 1913 -- to find the AP's third home.

This is the one former headquarters that survives. The building at 51 Chambers St. is directly across from New York's City Hall; it (and the neighboring 49 Chambers) were built by the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, an institution founded by the Irish Emigrant Society to serve its members. The offices of The Sun, a famed newspaper, were next door.

The exterior is a grand mixture of Beaux Arts and art nouveau. The interior, alas, is crumbling _ the offices are filled with city bureaucrats. But you can still see a bit of the old grandeur in the lobby's stained-glass ceiling and marble walls and floor.

The AP stayed there just 10 years. The next headquarters was a 15-minute subway ride and a short walk uptown, at 383 Madison Ave.

The AP moved in and opened for business on March 2, 1924 -- "without interruption in the service," notes Gramling, an accomplishment when you consider all the equipment and wire circuits that had to be moved for an organization that had come a long way since the days of scribes with pens, hunched over tables.

In the main newsroom, newsmen (and later, a few newswomen) wrote their stories on typewriters, editors went over them with pencils, and scores of operators punched the copy into teleprinters to be transmitted coast to coast.

This building, too, no longer exists; at the millennium's turn, the financial company Bear Stearns constructed a gleaming headquarters at that address.

By then, the AP was long gone, to its own building, five blocks away. The Associated Press Building was one of the last pieces of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s Depression-era experiment in urban renewal.

At 15 stories, it was one of Rockefeller Center's shortest buildings. The AP demanded an open, 34,000-square-foot newsroom on the fourth floor, and so the building could not support dozens of floors.

There were pneumatic tubes to carry messages from one department to another. There was an extraordinary and complex board to control the flow of news. For the first time, a building was linked to all five of the city's power stations, so no disaster could prevent the AP from dispatching the day's story. (They did not foresee the great power outage of 2003, when the AP eked by with its own generator.)

And of course, there was the Christmas tree each year -- just out the door and to the right.

Kent Cooper, the AP's legendary general manager, took the occasion of the move to 50 Rock to appraise the organization's past, and its future:

"The new Associated Press Building is a monument to the association's newspaper members and its employees. Through 90 years they have mutually striven that an accurate, unbiased chronicle of events, interestingly recorded, be available to newspaper readers. ...

"What you have aided in accomplishing in the past must continue into the future so that "By The Associated Press" shall prevail as long as the rights of a free press continue to make possible as uncensored, unfettered collection and dissemination of truthful news." (July 17, 2004)