1211 Sixth Avenue, Fox News

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 so…