Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City by Aurora Wallace

Abstract

130 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City. By Aurora Wallace. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012, 192 pages, $80.00 Cloth, $25.00 Paper. Reviewed by James West, University of Manchester In this fascinating study, Aurora Wallace explores the connection between the expanding American media industry and the New York City skyline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Complementing her rich use of secondary literature and newspaper sources with a delightful array of photographs, building designs and advertisements, Wallace focuses on the architectural ambitions of newspaper barons and their use of the city as a space in which to inscribe and assert their power. Building on the work of philosopher, literary critic and novelist Umberto Eco, who has argued that architecture and the mass media share a number of characteristics including their role as forms of communication and the periodic indifference of their public audience, Wallace argues for a mutually supporting relationship between newspapers and urban space, built around industrial capitalism, geographic concentration, and a specialization of labor. She contends that for publishers such as Benjamin Day of the New York Sun, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, architecture was an intimate part of their editorial designs and ambitions, from functioning as a symbol of publishing success, to intersecting the public and private realms through being constructed as “contributions to the greater good, civic pride, and the provision of space and amenities for the public, rather than for corporate providers” (5). The opening chapter examines the role of the penny press in making news accessible to working class citizens through the New York Sun and the New York Herald. As Wallace illustrates, the centrality of New York as a shipping port and the natural contours of Manhattan proved propitious for newspaper development. In particular, the city’s secular nature, particularly when compared to the religious Puritanism of cities such as Boston, provided fertile ground for the development of the fourth estate. These early newspapers situated themselves on Park Row in order to locate their offices between the political hub of City Hall, the financial nexus of Book Reviews 131 Wall Street, the East River Ports as a source of shipping and foreign news and the Five Points slum for exposes on crime and injustice. Chapter Two focuses on the emergence of the New York Times and the New York Tribune. Through their adoption of the tower form and architectural strategies such as embedding their names on the building’s facades, Wallace argues that these newspapers embraced skyscrapers as an important medium for the construction of their corporate image. The volume’s third and fourth chapters explore the attempts of newspapers to present themselves as forward thinking publications both geographically and architecturally, first through the move away from Park Row by the Tribune and the Times, and then the turn towards modernism through the Art Deco design of the New York Daily News. In chapter five, Wallace argues that in the post-World War II period a number of factors including media consolidation, labor strikes and increasing suburbanisation sent the print media into architectural retreat. By the 1960s, she contends that in contrast to the architectural battles between newspaper barons in the previous century which served as grand advertising platforms for their publications , the “image of the newspaper building in the late 1960s conjured in the public mind was now simply one of picket lines” (127). However, in her epilogue, Wallace charts how the emergence of three new twentyfirst century media skyscrapers in the shape of the AOL-Time Warner Building, the Hearst Building, and the New York Times Building illustrate how media corporations have been able to adapt their headquarters to a new global media industry and create a “new architecture of media conglomeration” (132) which stresses corporate transparency and environmental sensitivity. In doing so, these structures work to reposition the newspaper skyscraper as an acceptable means of corporate self-presentation and as a justifiable architectural statement in an age of excess and corporate malfeasance. The strengths of this text lie in Wallace’s ability to bring out many of the nuances connecting newspaper...