There's something inspiring about an ugly building. I don't mean an ugly conceptual building like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that is temporary and purely functional, if barely functional – your Meadowlands, your Knights of Columbus halls, your shopping malls. It's a dump, but our landfills. Some of my favorite landfills are old newsrooms. My first was TrentonianA New Jersey tabloid that is still limping along even though its former headquarters, where I worked, is now home to a plaster supply company. There was thin carpet, retro computers and too much space for too few people, like the Macrodata Refinement floor on “Severance pay” It was an unpretentious building: brown brick, very few windows. The parking lot was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. I think it looked like it could be used to store plaster. It could have been worse. In the previous building of the newspaper, the editorial office was on the third floor, just above where the journalists boiled lead in barrels. It got so hot there that some reporters worked without shirts. A few blocks away on Perry Street there was a rival newspaper, Time Trenton. Trentonian hated Time. Time it had a slightly larger building, with a larger sign, neon red in a blocky gothic logo font. The building is still nearby. For some time it was a warehouse for concrete products.
The Offices Only a Newsperson Could Love
