Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
It can be easy to forget that Fox News is a profoundly New York institution. Yes, its namesake, the Jewish Hungarian immigrant William Fox, founded Fox Film in New York in 1915, but more importantly its current nerve center, the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, is in the heart of Midtown, in a bleak tower in a row of almost cartoonishly bleak towers, a 592-foot sheer cliff of glass and limestone.
Murdoch played no role in the design of the building. Wallace Harrison designed it in the 1960s as the Z in a trio of towers called the XYZ Buildings, an unimaginative expansion of the neighboring Rockefeller Center opened in 1973. It was of its time, as monolithic slabs on plazas were sprouting up all over Manhattan, taking their cue from the recently completed Seagram Building and changes in the zoning law that allowed for extra height in exchange for public plazas. The Urban Design Group, a public advocacy organization created by the Lindsay administration, pleaded for some sort of gesture toward the ingenious urbanism of the original Rockefeller Center by advocating for a mid-block pedestrian arcade, a proposal that was halfheartedly executed as a sort of awkward back-of-house pedestrian thru-way.
While Murdoch may not have played any role in the design, the place does appear to suit him. It has been the headquarters of News Corp since the Murdoch created the company in 1980. As he started or bought other ventures—not just Fox but also the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal—News Corp sucked each newsroom from its respective home and into the tower. For a brief moment in 2015, Fox planned to leave the roost and move to the Financial District to become the anchor tenant of a brand new mega tower, the 1,270-foot-tall Bjarke Ingels–designed Two World Trade Center, but Murdoch got cold feet in 2016, tanking the project. Last year, News Corp and Fox doubled down on their home, signing a combined twenty-year, 1.1-million-square-foot agreement, the largest office lease of 2022.
Why would Fox, which aligns with a heartland viewership against coastal urban elites, find itself so at home in New York City, of all places? In part, Fox is in fact a product of that setting, a child of the power of midtown’s potpourri of financial institutions, the reach of its major media houses, and the bombastic theatricality of Broadway. NBC is across the street, and the old Cort Theatre directly abuts the tower to the west.
Fox probably also enjoys the building’s intimidation factor. The XYZ Buildings have evoked a sort of corporate dreadnought since their designs were released. Writing in the New York Times in 1968, Ada Louise Huxtable called the towers a “catastrophic course of construction” following a “neolithic pattern” with “corporate giants hermetically sealed off from their surroundings by a few more pointless, windswept plazas.” Writing in his 1978 book on the Rockefeller Center, Alan Balfour called them a representation of “bureaucratic imperialism,” each tower “a general issue product of bureaucracies that differ only in name, unconstrained by history or nature….” Visit News Corp’s wikipedia entry, and its profile photo is the tower, its gray corduroy silhouetted against a crisp blue sky.
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Perhaps most importantly, Fox clearly thrives off proximity to its enemies. Today, protesters are a regular feature of the plaza. Last December, an arsonist attacked its “All-American” Christmas tree. Fox’s primary contributions to the building’s architecture seem almost designed to troll its neighbors: a news ticker (matching the ticker that, since September 11, 2001, has run across the bottom of its shows) announces its headlines to all who pass by. Those who walkup to the ground-floor windows can see a lavish double-height television studio with windows to the street, named Studio M, for Murdoch. It reportedly cost $20 million and was originally built for a show dedicated to the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s presidency. It is bedecked in screens, including a retractable central “video chandelier” and a circular stage also made of a screen.
By contrast, we here at NYRA thrive off proximity to our friends, and in fact our resolution for 2023 is to make more of them. Does that mean we print only friendly reviews? No. True friends tell the truth. It does mean that we delight in collaborations. Last year we hosted talks and parties in an unfinished building, architecture offices, a community center, storefronts, galleries, bookstores, and bars, and we look forward to doing more of that this year. Would you like to work together? Tell me about it. Would we accept an invitation to cohost something at Studio M? Hard pass.