{"id":148623,"date":"2020-10-26T12:40:44","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T16:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=148623"},"modified":"2020-10-26T16:33:31","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T20:33:31","slug":"the-ghosts-of-newspaper-row","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/10\/26\/the-ghosts-of-newspaper-row\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ghosts of Newspaper Row"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Newsboys and newsgirls on Newspaper Row, Park Row, NYC. Photo by Lewis Wicks Hine from Library of Congress<\/p><\/div>\n

The reporters would pant up five flights of stairs to reach their dingy, dim newsrooms, where light eked through the dirt-cloaked windows and the green shades over the oil lamps were burned through with holes. They wended through hobbled tables piled high with papers, walked past cubbies so chaotically stuffed with scrolled proofs no outsider could guess the system. The reporters reeked of five-alarm smoke, or had coat pockets bulky with notes and a pistol from the front, or were tipsy from a gala ball, or dusty from a horse race. If they held important news in those notebooks, a copy boy would crowd by their elbow as they wrote, snatch the ink-wet sheets from their hands, and rush them off to the copyholder to \u201cput them into metal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The center of news in the nineteenth century lined the streets around City Hall Park, only a short sprint to Wall Street, close to the harbor. News sailed in on the wind. Newspaper schooners cut through the waves and fog to land their men onboard the arriving European steamers before the less affluent New York newspapers could get out there with their rowboats.<\/p>\n

Amid recent renovations on Park Row, construction workers discovered artifacts of news reporters inside the walls\u2014papers and typewriters. Who knows what ghosts might lurk there still?<\/p>\n

\u201cJournalism is the real Minotaur,\u201d nineteenth-century reporter Stephen Fiske remarked, looking back on his career. \u201cIt demands every year a fresh supply of young men and women: devours them, destroys them, and is ready for another batch of tender victims from colleges or country towns.\u201d He had begun as a columnist at age twelve. Other reporters jumped in audaciously in their twenties, such as Henry Villard, a German immigrant who rapidly taught himself English so as to cover the Lincoln\u2013Douglas debates.<\/p>\n

They were almost entirely anonymous. Inherited British etiquette dictated that to claim a byline would be immodest. It would risk encouraging flamboyance, even spark recklessness. Instead, they represented their team: the New York Times<\/em>, the New-York Tribune<\/em>, the New York Herald<\/em>, and on. Like a priest of the same era forbidden to use I<\/em>, reporters denied themselves the honor of possessing their writing. They seeded their identity into the words themselves.<\/p>\n

They wrote well to impress the reporter seated next to them, or rivals at the other papers. They strove to create in words the moving image of an event or the quirks of an important person. Photographic evidence was scant at that time. Reporters needed to be the eyes for those too far away to see. They wrote well to lasso in the readers who constantly strayed. Three-quarters of a newspaper\u2019s customers faded away each year, and newspapers needed to lure fresh ones.<\/p>\n

The reporters wrote fast. They fed the street-level, steam-driven presses that each inked some fifty miles of paper each day. They wrote to feed the conveyor belt of hooks that ran along the ceiling, from the editor to the foreman to the typographer. Stories hung like cow carcasses headed to butchery. \u201cThe fevered pencil flies, every nerve is strained, every brain-cell is clear,\u201d wrote one reporter of that time. \u201cComment, description, reminiscence, dialogue, and explanation flow upon the impatient sheets in short paragraphs, like slivers of crystal,\u201d wrote Julian Ralph, a British reporter who worked in New York City, in 1893.<\/p>\n

They focused even amid the clicking of the telegraph, the shouting of the editors, the joking of the office boy, and the copy cutters pressing their deadlines. The only relief came when the Associated Press marked the final delivery of the day\u2019s breaking news. \u201cOver the wires and at the end of the last sheet of flimsy has come the welcome message, \u2018Good-night,\u2019\u2009\u201d one editor, Melville Philips, recalled.<\/p>\n

The reporters mixed among the rich for sources or dared to knock at the most squalid crime dens. They heard out their critics; one tall, thin writer bent like a hook to politely listen to the manager of the theater whose production he had unflatteringly dissected, begged repetition (indicating bad hearing), and then, having failed to make out the tirade a second time, asked again and again, until wrath had withered.<\/p>\n

They competed to file. News lay out in distant towns and the reporter would pluck it like a giant\u2019s eye and race back with the prize to send over the closest telegraph. Julian Ralph remembered competing with a Tribune <\/em>man when out on assignment. \u201cWe had to run three miles over a plain that was one great glare of ice. He was the faster runner and appeared to have everything his own way, but suddenly he slipped and rolled down the side of a gully to fetch up at the bottom badly hurt. The tearing of his clothes and peeling of his face did not bother him, but his ankle was sprained and he could not walk without help. \u2018I give up,\u2019 said he. \u2018Will you help me to the village?\u2019 \u2018I don\u2019t know,\u201d I replied. \u201cIs the wire mine?\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

Though readers rarely knew who wrote what, the reporters knew each other well. Journalists scuffled in the streets, smacked each other with canes. They celebrated in private gathering spots. A few might be sufficiently bohemian enough to share a beer at Pfaff\u2019s on Broadway near Bleecker with Walt Whitman, the former editor of the Brooklyn Eagle<\/em>, or have angled into respectability at the Lotos Club. But they more likely visited the Bread and Cheese Club on Broadway and Reade Streets or the Sketch Club.<\/p>\n

They understood how to dowse for a story, to identify the vibrating image that could stir emotion. A reporter remembered a day with nothing but fourth-rate news unfolding, when he scanned every line of the afternoon paper with the managing editor, hunting for the next day\u2019s feature. The managing editor yelled out, \u201cI have it!\u201d A tiny baby girl had been found buried in Harlem. \u201cThe only uncommon item was that the infant was richly dressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The managing editor gave the orders: \u201cSee the place where the baby was found, the policeman who found it; follow it to Matron Webb\u2019s room in the police headquarters, where all foundlings are first taken, and get a long full account from the matron of \u2026 the most remarkable, the strangest, most pathetic, moving or stirring experiences she has had\u2026 Then \u2026 go to the asylum where these babies are brought up, and to the Potter\u2019s Field where they are buried.\u201d<\/p>\n

William Cullen Bryant, editor at the Evening Post<\/em> and a poet, hung on the newsroom wall his \u201cIndex Expurgatorious\u201d for writers, his commandments for striking out words that failed to chime the way others could: \u201cJeapordize should not be used.\u201d \u201cGratuitous means \u2018without payment.\u2019 \u201d \u201cJewelry for jewels.\u201d Don\u2019t use \u201cbulls and bears\u201d for Wall Street.<\/p>\n

They sacrificed human comforts, like Gerald Hallock who stayed in the city to run the Journal of Commerce<\/em> while his family lived in New Haven. He collapsed onto a cot in the office each night, took lonely dinners in restaurants, and \u201cslept on his arms,\u201d the image of a man devoted to his desk. When reporting a fire, he fell into a newly dug cellar in the dark streets. \u201cI sat down on the curbstone to rub myself, and, seeing the light of the fire brighten up, I started for it,\u201d he told a friend.<\/p>\n

Julian Ralph remembers the wealthiest man in the country, baffled, observing to him after an interview: \u201cYou mastered the intricacies of financial matters in hours and yet you persist in this profession with no pecuniary gain unless one\u2019s aim is to run a paper?\u201d Ralph had no satisfactory answer. His desire to use his intellect to fill newspaper columns was inexplicable except as a relationship with fellow journalists and the dead ones.<\/p>\n

Because of their anonymous voices, we know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Lincoln\u2019s sorrows, and the draft riots, when violent white mobs beat passersby, lynched and mutilated Black people, and torched homes. The anonymous journalists reported those incidents including peculiar details, such as expensive pianos smashed with pickaxes, mirrors shattered by stones. \u201cOne fellow appeared at a window with a picture of the President, spat on it, split it over his knee and hurled it into the street, where it was quickly trampled into atoms. Then, in a half a dozen places at once, the flames burst forth. So rapidly did they spread that some of the plunderers in the house had to escape from the windows by means of ladders.\u201d<\/p>\n

They covered the heat wave of 1896 during which fifteen hundred New Yorkers perished. \u201cThe spot that was perhaps hottest of all was the glaring asphalted pass in front of the City Hall. A man threw up his hands and fell there shortly before noon. A thermometer on the steps at the time held mercury that was at the 112-degree mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or those that survived: \u201cThe close structure of the lower part of the Third Avenue Elevated Railroad was a boon to the east side all day. Under it was real shade and were it not for the humidity the shelter would have been perfect. Hundreds of boys sat along the curbs, too listless for play or mischief. Men came out of the broiling sun above Canal Street or below the City Hall and stopped to rest and breathe beneath the rumbling trains.\u201d<\/p>\n

They climbed the inner scaffolding of the Statue of Liberty before it was clad with copper, describing the experience in the third person. \u201cHe looked downward, and the earth seemed further than the sky. The rounds of the ladders had disappeared and there seemed to be nothing by which to descend but the iron beams of the framework. The swaying of the treetops beneath unnerved him as much as the sweeping movement of the long arm above\u2026 Just as he got to the forearm a triumphant shout reached his ears. The [cartoon] artist had both his hands clasped on Liberty\u2019s wrist and was \u2018feeling her pulse.\u2019 He was the first that ever burst into that dizzy spot except the workmen. No such glorious view of New York bay was ever obtained before. The air was clear and there was no limit upon the human sight except human frailty. Great ships looked like sloops, schooners like sailboats, men like moving sticks. Even the Brooklyn Bridge seemed a thing of the earth\u2019s surface, which could be touched with the hand by any one sailing under it.\u201d<\/p>\n

All writers contribute to humanity\u2019s intellectual compost, nourishing future ideas, but few do so more plainly than those anonymous writers. As Edward G.\u2009P. Wilkins wrote about one of his gifted colleagues, \u201chis writings are buried in the files of \u2018The Herald,\u2019 \u2018The Saturday Press,\u2019 and \u2018the Leader,\u2019 and they are buried forever.\u201d Those reporters did not cherish the silly illusion that their names would echo through the ages. They skipped the stage of \u201cI\u2019ve never heard of him\u201d to immediately become what might be valued forever: their words.<\/p>\n

In the Cypress Hill Cemetery in Queens, on a hilltop at the \u201cbrow of a small hill, commanding a beautiful view of the country for many miles around, with Jamaica Bay and ocean in the distance,\u201d is a graveyard, acquired in 1871 by the New York Press Club, originally for 360 graves for \u201cfriendless journalists.\u201d The space was intended for newspaper people who \u201cdie in the city without means or inclination to be buried elsewhere.\u201d At an 1887 ceremony, thousands gathered to dedicate a thirty-eight-foot obelisk inscribed NEW YORK PRESS BURIAL PLOT<\/small>. Under sunny skies, Chauncey Depew, the railroad president and sought-after orator, honored the fallen: \u201cThe reporter, with no incentive but his duty, outdoes the soldier, and telegraphs to his paper an account that electrifies the world, but bears no signature.\u201d<\/p>\n

An 1866 obituary for a newspaperman expressed the writer\u2019s fervent hope of what such people might earn in the afterlife: \u201cThere he shall be able to see the immense masses of mind he has moved, all unknowing and unknown as he has been, during his weary pilgrimage on earth. There he will find all articles credited\u2014not a clap of his thunder stolen; and there shall be no horrid typographical errors to set him in a fever.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elizabeth Mitchell is the author of <\/em>Lincoln\u2019s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, and the White House (October 2020\/Counterpoint Press).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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