The Herald Co. Building under construction, 1969. At its peak, the building employed over 700 people, working around the clock.  The original printing press was 300 feet long and capable of producing 70,000 newspapers an hour. It was replaced in 2002, when the new 41,000 sq. ft. glass press opened. The interior is currently being completely remodeled by its owner, Dave Nutting, CEO of VIP Structures. Courtesy of the Onondaga Historical AssociationCourtesy of the Onondaga Histori

A rather significant bit of local history transpired earlier this week, and, sadly, it seems to have flown under nearly everyone’s radar.

On Sunday, August 14, the final edition of The Post-Standard printed in Syracuse rolled off the 20-year-old WIFAG press in the hulking glass edifice on the back of a building that has dominated Clinton Square for over five decades.

This brings an unceremonious end to nearly two centuries of newspaper printing in the Salt City.

And while the print edition of The Post-Standard is not going away – thankfully – the dismantling of downtown’s last printing press marks the end of an era in one of the city’s oldest industries. Yet, much like the newspaper business, the former Post-Standard building is changing to meet the needs of the community. As such, the site once again finds itself at the center of Syracuse’s evolution and renaissance.

As it happens, the building sits on one of the most historic pieces of property in the city.

Syracuse Journal building, corner of Montgomery and East Fayette Streets, 1949. Opened in 1917, the Journal was acquired by William Randolph Hearst in 1925.  The building served as the home of the Post-Standard from 1940 until 1965. Courtesy of the Onondaga Historical AssociationCourtesy of the Onondaga Histori

Long before Clinton Square, long before even the Erie Canal, when the land here was an uninhabited forested marshland between the settlements in Salina and Onondaga, it was home to Henry Bogardus. In 1806, Bogardus purchased half an acre from Abraham Walton for $300 and built a two-story wood building that he operated as a tavern. The site became known as Bogardus Corners, and it was the heart of a small settlement that had no use for even a weekly paper.

The completion of the first section of the Erie Canal on July 4, 1820, which ran directly in front of Bogardus’s tavern, brought about a radical transformation in the sleepy hamlet of about 250 people, known then as Corinth.

Corinth had two taverns, no school, and no church. That did not stop John Wilkinson Esq., from leaving Onondaga Hill and setting up a law office there directly across the canal from Bogardus’s tavern.

The next year, Wilkinson, who was appointed the new postmaster, renamed the growing town Syracuse.

By April of 1823, the population had reached a point where John Durnford, a native of the West Indies, settled there and opened a print shop on the north side of the canal.

On April 2, Durnford printed Syracuse’s very first newspaper, the Onondaga Gazette, just a short distance from the site now occupied by the former Post-Standard building. According to the history written in the city’s 1868 directory, Dunford’s paper contained eight advertisements including one for Pomeroy’s Razor Strop and for Jedidiah Morse’s book, “American Universal Geography.”

By 1824, the original Syracuse House was being erected on the site now occupied by the former M & T Bank building, Bogardus’s Tavern became the Mansion House, and Durnford changed the name of his paper to the Syracuse Gazette & Daily Advertiser, in order to identify its place of publication and to differentiate it from Lewis Redfield’s Onondaga Register, the county’s first newspaper, published in Onondaga Hollow since 1814.

By the time the Marquis de Lafayette visited the Mansion House on June 9, 1825, Syracuse was officially a village. It was growing so quickly that it needed a second newspaper, the Syracuse Advertiser, published by Wyman and Barnum.

In the spring of 1829, Redfield, recognizing the demographic shifts towards the bustling village growing up on the banks of the Erie Canal, relocated himself and his newspaper to Syracuse. That same year, Vivus Smith, a close friend of Thurlow Weed (Redfield’s former apprentice) one of New York’s most successful printer politicians who, with Smith in the 1850s, played a role in the formation of the nascent Republican Party, also moved to Syracuse and brought his Onondaga Journal with him.

Foreshadowing a practice that became commonplace in the local newspaper business throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Redfield immediately bought out Durnford and consolidated the sheets.

He opened a new four-story print-shop and bookstore on the south side of the canal in Hanover Square, on the site currently occupied by the Gridley Building. From this space, he published the Onondaga Register and Syracuse Gazette every Wednesday morning until he sold the paper in 1832.

A subscription cost $2 annually, but for an extra fifty cents, you could have it delivered.

Smith consolidated his Journal and the Advertiser, and began publishing the Onondaga Standard, the first newspaper in Syracuse to carry that name in its masthead. In 1844, Smith and his brother, Silas, published the village’s first daily newspaper, a sign of Syracuse’s significant maturation.

Over the ensuing five decades, Syracuse grew at a breakneck pace. During those years, dozens of newspapers came and went, some only lasting an issue or two.

By 1898, the population had reached approximately 90,000 inhabitants and there were 40 different newspapers being published by various churches, ethnic groups, social clubs and associations, etc., but the most important of the city’s dailies were the Syracuse Herald, The American, Syracuse Journal, Syracuse Standard, Syracuse Post, and the Syracuse Courier.

And, despite current lamentations about the lost objectivity of the news, with the exception of the Herald that staked its reputation on its independence, each newspaper proudly identified itself as a party organ.

On the day after Christmas, the Post and the Standard merged. The first edition of the Post-Standard was published on January 1, 1899, out of the Post’s facility at 130 East Genesee Street in Hanover Square. The building is still there.

Four decades later, the Syracuse newspaper business entered a new phase of consolidation, one that had a profound impact on not only the business, but on the city and the university that bears its name.

In 1939, a 44 year-old businessman, S.I. Newhouse acquired the Herald and the Journal for $1.9 million and merged the two papers, making them a part of what would become his Advance Media empire.

Five years later, Newhouse purchased The Post-Standard.

For the next 20 years, Newhouse’s Syracuse papers maintained separate facilities, with The Post Standard being printed in the old Journal building on the corner of East Fayette and Montgomery Streets. The Herald Journal and the Herald American on the other hand, were published at 220 Herald Place, built in 1928.

Then in 1965, as the city of Syracuse was in the midst of a series of massive and controversial urban renewal projects and the construction of Interstate 81 and 690, Stephen Rogers, the publisher of all three papers, announced that they were to be consolidated and brought under one roof.

After a few years of negotiations with city and federal agencies, The Herald Co. purchased the entire block on the northern side of Clinton Square for $800,000. Much to the chagrin of many Syracuse residents, the beloved third Onondaga County Courthouse was among the buildings destroyed to make way for the massive new 230,000 square foot building,

However, both Mayor William Walsh and Rogers championed the project as a sign of downtown Syracuse’s resilience and revitalization.

On June 20, 1971, hundreds turned out for the dedication ceremonies, including an impressive list of community and business leaders and assorted dignitaries including U.S. Senators Jacob Javits and James Buckley, Rep. James Hanley and S.I. Newhouse Jr. and his brother, Donald. There, looking at the assembled crowd, just a short distance from where John Durnford published the city’s first newspaper 148 years before, Congressman Hanley offered these remarks, as germane today as they were then.

After noting that the words of the First Amendment were emblazoned on the marble wall of the building’s lobby, he said, “The role of the press has gone so far beyond the recording of events, that it is today a major power in and of itself. With that power goes responsibility to match.”

Hanley concluded, “I would be the first to point that I do not always agree with them, but I read them and in this frenetic world, that is the first step to mutual understanding.”

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