In changing era, Sun shifts to Port Covington location

SUN,

Since then, the organization has expanded and contracted, opening regional and foreign bureaus during flush times and closing them in tighter ones. It went from typewriters, copy boys and pneumatic tubes to computers, website updates and live tweeting.

An institution once run exclusively by white men largely from the same several families, it became less inbred and more diverse. The Sun, The Evening Sun and The Sunday Sun — called collectively The Sunpapers back then by everyone, and now still by longtime residents — are now a single morning paper, plus a website that reaches a larger audience. And it went from local to corporate ownership, and through the multiple spasms of the newspaper industry.

Upheaval in the business has left many newspapers with downtown buildings too big for their needs. As advertising and other revenues have shrunk, so too have newspaper staffs — by 45 percent in the past decade, the Pew Research Center reports. In many cases, the huge spaces that once housed printing presses were already empty, with many papers having already sent the hulking machines to remote locations.

Nikki Usher, a professor at the George Washington University school of media and public affairs, says the continuing shift from paper to digital products has prompted many organizations to move to “postindustrial news spaces.”

“You’re looking for server space,” she said. “You need space under the floor for wiring. You need completely different things now.”

Trif Alatzas, The Sun’s publisher and editor, said the Calvert Street building was built for a different time, when staff was more tied to desks and landlines, and schedules were organized around print deadlines rather than continuous digital updates.

“The way we gather news and sell advertising, we just do it a lot differently now,” he said. “We needed new space whether we stayed here, or wherever we went.

“We need more opportunities for people to be more mobile, and to be able to plug in and play when they sit down,” Alatzas said. “A lot of people do their jobs on their phones and their laptops now, and [the Calvert Street newsroom] was kind of designed for when you just sat at your computer and when we didn’t have the kind of mobility we have now.”

Alatzas said The Sun chose Sun Park after considering properties throughout the city.

The Calvert Street building it leaves will likely go the way of many of its neighbors — the new owner, Atapco Properties, has said it’s considering a mixed-use development that could include a hotel, offices, restaurant, grocery store and performance space. In other words, the kinds of amenities that would serve a downtown where former banks, office buildings and company headquarters have been converted into places to live rather than work.

Other papers have moved out of iconic but often too-big quarters. The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Sun’s corporate cousin, the Chicago Tribune, have all moved to leased space near their former homes. Others, such as the Los Angeles Times and The Miami Herald, have left their downtowns entirely.

Usher, who wrote a paper on the phenomenon for Columbia University, said media organizations are building newsrooms around a central hub — “Mission Control” at The Des Moines Register, for example, and “Starship Enterprise” at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The configuration allows editors, reporters and online staff to communicate as they update content continually.

And yet, even as the new spaces might be more suited to how journalists work today, and readers likely will see no change in what they read, there is at least a symbolic loss in leaving behind an old building, Usher said.

“I think for reporters, it’s the sense that you’re connected to a larger tradition, a common cause and an identity,” she said. “It’s tied to that legacy, and it’s tied to something larger than your immediate business, more than the number of Twitter followers that you have.”

Usher believes this feeling can extend to the “mind space” of the larger community, where the physical presence of the newspaper downtown signaled the role it played in political, business and civic life.

“Place matters,” she said. “What does it mean when the watchdog is no longer physically watching over you from their perch?”

The Sun’s Calvert Street location is just north of the central business district, but close enough to be considered part of downtown. That was of value to both the paper and the area, said Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership.

“I think people benefited from running into each other downtown,” he said. “I do think there’s great value to people being close together, just bumping into each other on the street.

“But I don’t think Port Covington is so far away,” he added.

Maybe The Sun can invest in a bunch of Birds, Fowler said, the rental scooters that have turned up in town recently, so reporters can more easily get back downtown to cover stories.

The move indeed has been dreaded by many reporters, particularly those whose beats took them, usually by foot, to City Hall, the courthouses and other locations that are now a drive away.

Alatzas said The Sun is changing addresses but not mission. He noted that reporters don’t walk to the city school district headquarters on North Avenue, but cover it as aggressively as any nearer agency.

The staff that moved to Calvert Street when it was the “new” location was similarly reluctant. They had worked in a much beloved building at Baltimore and Charles streets, dubbed Sun Square by mayoral proclamation, the city’s version of New York’s Times Square. The place where residents flocked at moments of big news or civic celebration. The end of World War II, for example, or for updates from the World Series.

“Sun Square wasn’t just a newspaper building. It was the heartbeat of a community,” said Gil Sandler, 95, the writer, radio personality and raconteur.

As a teenager, Sandler was a copy boy at Sun Square, a glorified errand-runner who would ferry advertising proofs between the paper and downtown ad agencies, dreaming of one day following in Mencken’s footsteps.

By the mid-1940s, the paper had outgrown Sun Square. Its aging presses needed to be replaced, and the trucks that delivered huge rolls of newsprint and distributed the finished newspapers were continually getting stuck in downtown congestion.

Mencken was among the staff members who resisted the move. He considered the new building an expensive, unnecessary ego trip on the part of his friend, publisher Paul Patterson.

“He is eager to build himself a monument,” Mencken said, “and doesn’t seem to remember that it may be a monument to the loss of solvency of the Sun.”

Mencken proposed building a “barn” for the new presses and letting the rest of the operation remain at Sun Square. Instead, the papers’ owners, the A.S. Abell Co., bought a 5-acre site on Calvert Street from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The original design by Palmer, Fisher, Williams & Nes, called for a four-story building with a 10-story tower, which along with the new presses was projected to cost $4 million. But it opened with five stories, and later gained a sixth.

In 1978, when The Sun bought newer presses and built a three-story addition on Bath Street, the cost would no doubt have given Mencken more heartburn: $50 million.

Although the Sage of Baltimore, who died in 1956, opposed the move to Calvert Street, he remains a presence there: A wall in the lobby bears his image, and his stirring words: “As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.”

The Sun bought a parking garage a block to the north and built a skywalk to connect to the original building. All told, the property encompasses more than 435,000 square feet, spread over the 400, 500 and 600 blocks of North Calvert.

Retired Sun photographer Walter McCardell Jr., 93, remembers co-workers bringing a bit of Sun Square to their new Calvert Street office: They collected cockroaches in a cigar box from the old building and released them in the new one.

Still, McCardell said, “we missed downtown.”

“But as a photographer, you’re on the road most of the time anyway,” he said.

Soon, he said, the staff had adopted the Calvert House restaurant to the south as their after-work hangout. Compared with bustling Sun Square, the street was so quiet by 2 a.m. that one photographer used to hit golf balls down Calvert, sometimes bouncing them against the walls of Mercy Medical Center.

McCardell came to appreciate the advantages to the new building. It was a short walk from his apartment on West Monument Street, where reporter and future London correspondent Russell Baker lived as well. The photographers had much more darkroom space in their new third-floor quarters, McCardell said, on the other side of “Brains Alley,” as they called the editorial writers’ offices.

The newsroom was on the fifth floor, but even up there, the rumble of the presses could be felt reverberating through the building.

The staffs of The Evening Sun and the morning Sun eyed one another warily from their separate newsrooms. The two staffs — and that of the once separate Sunday Sun — shared the library and photo departments, which meant a reporter sometimes would learn what a rival was working on.

“You would go to get clips in the library and they would say, ‘Oh, [Evening Sun reporter] Mike Fletcher has those out,’ ” said Kathy Lally, a former reporter, foreign correspondent and editor for the morning and Sunday papers. “And you would think, ‘What is he working on? I have to beat him.’ ”

For Lally, now an editor at The Washington Post, Calvert Street is where a once rather staid news organization modernized.

She joined the paper in 1975, a time when there were few women in power. When the makeup editor — the liaison to the composing room — was training her to fill in for him, Lally said, he warned the all-male typesetting staff: “All right, you animals. See this woman? Don’t even think of touching her.”

Those men were fine, she said, helping her out with such wizardry as lopping the tail off a comma to make it a period and trim a story to fit.

It was in the newsroom, she said, where women had to agitate for greater roles. She watched as men received all the promotions, she said, while women “never even had the chance to talk about our careers and our ambitions.”

In October 1978, newsroom discontent led Sun managing editor Paul A. Banker to appoint a task force of reporters and editors "to examine and analyze all departments of The Sun and Sunday Sun," he wrote in a memo to the staff.

He appointed a task force that Lally credits with helping usher in a new era at the paper, including the hiring of more women and minorities. That culminated with the appointment of Mary J. Corey to the top newsroom job in 2010, a job she held until her death from cancer three years later.

During The Sun’s 68-year tenure on Calvert Street, the paper went from local ownership — descendants of A.S. Abell and other shareholders from prominent Baltimore families — to out-of-town corporate control.

Kevin Abell, a reporter and editor from 1976 to 1986, was the last of his family to work at the paper while various relatives served on the board.

That led to a bit of awkwardness when, as a member of the Newspaper Guild, he walked the picket line during one of several strikes.

“I was a Guild member first,” said Abell, 65, who lives in Lutherville. “I still have the sign; it’s framed on my wall.”

Abell has fond memories of his time on Calvert Street, separate from his family ties.

“I loved walking up the steps of The Sun building as one of the great newspapers of the country,” he said. “Here’s a great institution in the heart of the city, as important as Johns Hopkins or Mercy down the street. It had a key function in the life of Baltimore.”

Shortly after he left the paper — with a See SUN, page 17