THE NEW YORKER, ON THE MOVE

The New Yorker ended the first month of the new year by moving. For the last 15 years, the magazine that Harold Ross founded in 1925 has had its offices at 4 Times Square; effective February 1, it joined its parent company, Conde Nast, at 1 World Trade Center. This is only the fifth home for the 90-year-old magazine. When Ross launched the first issue (dated February 21, a date commemorated every year the last week of February with an anniversary issue, usually reprinting the first issue’s cover, a Rea Irvin drawing of a supercilious 19^th century boulevardier), the office was at 25 West 45^th Street.

Until now, the magazine has always resided in a mid-town office: in 1935, it moved to 25 West 43^rd Street, where it remained for over 50 years until 1989, when it moved a few doors down the block to 20 West 43^rd Street. In 1999, it moved to the location it has just abandoned to move decidedly south, far away from the old neighborhood.

On the cover of the February 2 issue, artist Bruce McCall  celebrates the move with a picture showing the Editorial staff on a flatbed heading south to the new World Trade Center skyscraper in the distance, some of the famous Times Square signs marking aspects of the magazine’s history.

 

 

“Eustace” became the first name of Irvin’s cover dandy when Corey Ford produced in the summer of 1925 a series of ads in the magazine promoting subscriptions. Eustace’s last name, Tilley, Ford borrowed from a favorite aunt.

“Dubuque” on the side of a building refers to Ross’s notorious Prospectus for the magazine. Circulated in the fall of 1924 to drum up financial support, the Prospectus described the magazine as “a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life” — life in New York, the life led by sophisticated readers. It would not be a national magazine; it would not be edited “for the old lady in Dubuque.”

On the back of the flatbed is an allusion to something not peculiar to the magazine. The Collyer Brothers were bachelors who lived in a mansion in Manhattan. One of them became blind, and the other began collecting magazines and newspapers and storing them in the mansion against the day when his brother would regain his sight and want to catch up on the events that had transpired during his blindness. Over the ensuing years, the rooms and hallways in the house were piled with towering stacks of periodicals. One of the brothers eventually died, and the other was found crushed under an avalanche of magazines and newspapers.

The allusion was, perhaps, to the sort of detritus that someone accumulates in his office over the years of his residing in it—books, magazine and newspaper clippings, all possible fodder for some future article. As Nick Paukmgarten says in this issue’s Talk of the Town, an “accretion of intention.” Exactly the situation here at the Rancid Raves Intergallactic Wurlitzer. The expression too exquisite a bon mot for me to leave it buried forever in an expired issue of one of my favorite magazines. (Favored because it, like Playboy, publishes cartoons. Yes, I buy it for the cartoons, kimo sabe, not centerfolds. Although who can overlook a centerfold?)