In an unsentimental world, the old Post building is being reduced to rubble, while a swanky new piece of more modern real estate will soon rise in its place. But this was where, over months and years, two young reporters pieced together the most famous of all 20th-century journalistic investigations. The unravelling of the Watergate burglary’s White House connections, led by the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and robustly protected by editor Ben Bradlee and ownerKatherine Graham, climaxed in the one and only resignation of a US president in 1974. It elevated investigative journalism to an unprecedented position of global esteem, in whose reflected glow we all still bask a little.
The demolition of the Post’s famous open-plan newsroom is a glumly well-trodden path for industrial-era newspapers. After nearly a century, in 1970 the Guardian left its own Victorian offices in Manchester’s Cross Street on a journey to becoming a digital news organisation based in London, New York and Sydney, and publishing not each morning but every minute of every day. The Times, abandoning Printing House Square in 1974, did something similar in London. Both buildings were promptly demolished. The Scotsman, by contrast, moved out of its marble-staircased headquarters on Edinburgh’s North Bridge at the end of the 20th century but the buildings are now a hotel. Visitors can sleep in luxury where hot metal type was once expertly assembled.
In the centres of formerly industrial cities are a multiplicity of buildings whose original function has become redundant or has developed in new ways. Railway stations, once embodiments of urban modernity and what Tony Judt called “neo-ecclesiastical monumentalism”, have become art galleries, as in Paris’s Quai d’Orsay, or conference centres, like Manchester Central.
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