One of the most centrally located and prominent buildings in New York is just about invisible and has, for the past few decades, stood almost entirely empty. It was 1902, the Tennessee native Adolph Ochs had just succeeded in buying The New York Times and bringing it back to life, and he was ready to put down a marker: a new tower, in a new part of town, on top of a knot of new subway lines. It was to be the tallest building in New York. It was to resemble Giotto’s Campanile in Florence. Ochs hoped that it would “wake up the nation.” The architects, C.L.W. Eidlitz and Andrew C. MacKenzie, took his lot, a Broadway triangle, and gave him a narrow wedge of wedding cake 363 feet tall: three stories of Indiana limestone supporting sixteen stories of white brick trimmed in gothic terracotta, supporting a six-story office tower, all topped by an observatory deck, lantern, and flagpole.
It was wildly expensive, its budget jumping from $1.1 to $1.7 million ($58 million today) as Ochs insisted on finishing those last six stories, lest it be dismissed as “little flatiron.” For all that, it was only the second tallest tower in town — and it quickly proved a lousy building for making a newspaper. The basement, where the printing happened, had no room for expansion because it was surrounded by subway tunnels. There was only one small elevator for the transportation of rolls of newsprint to said basement. The subway vibrations were so violent that it became necessary to lay down a layer of sand between the first and second story. By 1913, the Times had abandoned the building, moving into a quieter home at 229 W. 43rd Street. By the 1960s, the Broadway building’s new owners had stripped off the terracotta and plastered the entire building with advertisements, plunging it into a state of hyper-visible anonymity that continues to this day.
Still, Ochs’s building had made its mark. The city (and the politically well-connected developer who owned both the surrounding land and the subway lines) renamed the intersection at which it stood Times Square. To help promote the new headquarters, Ochs held New Year’s Eve parties. On midnight at the 1908 party, Ochs dropped a ball down the flagpole atop his building, 1 Times Square, creating perhaps the world’s most iconic (and loathed) New Year’s celebration.
I write about Ochs because we, too, wanted to create something in the center of things. Or even create a new center. Confronted with a fragmented architecture world, we wanted something that could pull it all together, taking a name that conveyed, as plainly as possible, what it does and where it does it.
We, too, in our enthusiasm built something somewhat impractical. Starting with our first issue, published on May 1, 2019, we used a risograph printer. It was economical for a single page broadsheet, but as we grew to four pages, our per-issue printing cost became very high. Moreover, the issues would arrive from the printer as piles of paper. We would then collate, fold, and stuff each issue into an envelope—all by hand. As our circulation crossed the one-thousand-copy mark, it was time to rethink our print issue.
In March of this year, we surveyed our readers. Working from more than a hundred responses, our team—led by art director Laura Coombs and editors Samuel Medina and Marianela D’Aprile—mapped out a new course. First, while the content received a lot of love and praise, most of the readers were also ready for a different format. They found the page progression confusing—or, to quote one respondent, “I truly hate how it’s bound.” So we sought out a format that would be bound and easy to read, eventually arriving at the 10.5” x 16” stapled tabloid you hold now.
We also decided to take a different approach to the content. Whereas previously, almost all of the articles appeared as a continuous scroll with minimal differentiation—the “open floor plan” approach to a publication—NYRA now has front, back, and side doors, connected by a series of rooms, among them Skyline, Essays, Conversation, and Shortcuts.
Our readers also did not have any lust for the photography that defines so many architecture publications. That our readers would be so inclined is probably our own fault. From the first issue, we emphasized words over photographs. In an early conversation, a mentor remarked, “architecture publications are easy, you just print a bunch of beautiful photography.” Then he saw our first issue: four thousand words of text packed onto a single broadsheet. “Oh.” NYRA’s allegiance will continue to be to words and drawings. In June, we conducted a call for illustrators, through which we found Sean Suchara to make our cover and a cohort of others—including Laura Szyman, whose drawings accompany this issue’s Shortcuts—to bring illustrated life to our pages.
Our tradition of creating collectible posters with each issue will continue, both with our issue centerfolds and through a dedicated imprint, NYRA Editions, led by Phillip Denny.
Finally, our new home cherishes and emphasizes conversation. We created more spaces, such as the letters section, to hear from our community. Two sections, Skyline and Shortcuts, channel the density of our original broadsheet format and mark the beginning and end of each issue, holding between them essays, reviews, and reported pieces. A dedicated attack piece, Wrecking Ball, provides a kick on the way out.
In some ways our new home is somewhat predictable, maybe even inevitable. It is a little similar to the Brooklyn Rail and that other New York review. It matches almost precisely our “spirit publication,” the 1970s architecture rag Skyline, which also made the stapled tabloid its home. That suits us. We never planned to surprise or startle with our format. The artists, designers, and writers within will do that.
In the meantime, we are already thinking about our next big project… NYRA Square.