Also For Sale: My Shining White Knight

It's now official: the shining white Beaux-Arts tower that has housed the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1924 (and later, the Daily News) is on the block, along with the big chunk of real estate behind it. Ever since I first stepped through the doors in 1984, I always loved the building, by Rankin, Kellogg and Crane, for its mix of lofty ambition and no-nonsense, ink-stained utilitarianism. Sure the lobby was slathered in marble pilasters and graced with a globe of the world, but all pretense to grandeur ended right there. A few steps beyond those polished walls, and you were deep into a forest of bare concrete, broken and unmatched desks, cluttered stacks of yellowed newsprint, discarded food containers and several generations of detritus. When I first arrived, a Rube Goldberg network of pneumatic tubes still snaked around the interior, so editors could send glass rockets of typed paper copy to the composing room and pressroom. The tubes are gone, but I suspect that some of the fixtures - most notably the toilets in the third floor women's room - date to the original building. The newsroom didn't get carpeted until a renovation in the late 1990s because one crusty editor was of the firm belief that we should be able to grind our cigarettes out on the floor. Now that that the New York Times has moved to a gossamer -pretty, Renzo Piano-designed tower, the Inquirer and Daily News building is among the last of the gritty,big-city Front-Page era news buildings still in use. Its exact contemporary, Raymond Hood’s Chicago Tribune tower, still holds on.

For a great, metropolitan daily - "An Independent Newspaper for the All the People" - you couldn't find a building that better expressed the brand. Located seven blocks directly north of City Hall, the Inquirer's modest white, terra cotta clock tower was a blunt, symbolic counter-point to the ornate, marble one atop city government's lavishly decorated birthday cake. One tower was the bastion of the city's political rulers; the other, the crusading defender of the people. You'd see the pair lined up from a distance, staring each other down. I called the Inquirer a "shining white knight" in my post below on the state office building because its coloring , scale and isolation on the skyline spoke volumes about how its owners saw the newspaper's role: the noble, lone seeker of truth.

When the Inquirer's 23-story steel-frame tower went up at Broad and Callowhill Streets, it was the tallest building that far north of City Hall. Eighty years later, it is still among the tallest on North Broad Street. The decision to locate it so far north of Center City was an instance of hope triumphing over reality. The Inquirer's owners at that time wanted to believe the city's business district would continue its march uptown. It didn't. Oh well. There's still time. The Inquirer's isolated perch made it a landmark that could be seen far and wide across the city, reassuring evidence of democracy at work. Publisher Brian Tierney, a guy who knows a thing or two about branding, says he wants a new icon for the Inquirer, Daily News, Philly.Com and whatever else it is that we publish. Let's hope it speaks as clearly and passionately about the role of journalism in the 21st Century media as this out-moded old house of scribes did.