A worn pair of work boots hang from a lamp inside the cavernous, ink-stained press room at 55 Exchange Blvd. There is a stillness beneath the massive windows, in this space once filled by a three-story-tall newspaper press and a deafening hum.
Carts sit idle that once rode steel rails embedded in the floors, ferrying rolls of newsprint to feed the presses of the Democrat and Chronicle and now-defunct Times-Union.
This is the building that Frank Gannett built, a historic landmark in the center city that has housed Rochester's largest dailies for 87 years, helped birth one of the nation's biggest media companies, and witnessed the evolution of journalism from typewriters and letterpress printing to the multimedia age with its online and mobile platforms.
On Monday, when Gannett is expected to split into separate broadcast/digital and newspaper companies, the Democrat and Chronicle will celebrate its building-to-be on the former Midtown site, a return to Main Street, and both the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.
The company split affects 46 broadcast stations, Cars.com, CareerBuilder.com, 92 community media organizations, USA TODAY and 18 daily publications in the United Kingdom.
The D&C move, first announced in April 2014, will have the Democrat and Chronicle Media Group occupying two floors of a $6 million, three-story building to be owned by Pike Co.
"We're moving our operation but we're bringing a strong history and commitment from Exchange to Main," said Michael Kane, president and publisher of the Democrat and Chronicle Media Group. "That spirit will inspire us to serve this community in new ways looking ahead with core values instilled a long time ago. The future looks bright and I think Frank Gannett would be proud."
Frank Gannett was known in some circles as "The Great Hyphenator" for his penchant for buying multiple properties that were losing money and combining them into profitable endeavors. His efforts, and those of newspaper entrepreneurs like him, helped carry the newspaper industry through the Great Depression and the coming competition of radio and television. Those efforts are embodied in steel and stone at 55 Exchange.
Monday's expected announcement of a split into Tegna, the broadcast and digital company, and the new Gannett publishing company, is in many ways a reversal of the trend Gannett started over a century ago, said Dennis Floss, a spokesman for the Democrat and Chronicle Media Group.
So Monday very much represents a new era for the Gannett legacy, in both Rochester and the nation.
Come this time next year, the halls and offices of the five-story Gannett building at the corner of Broad and Exchange will likely be empty, the floors swept clean, enveloped in the same stillness of that press room.
"The newsroom was the absolute glorious chaos ... that you have seen in old movies," said longtime reporter and D&C columnist Carol Ritter-Wright whose career with Gannett spanned 1961 to 2004. "It was messy. It was loud. People were smoking. There were papers all over the place. It was wonderful.
"I hate to see traditions end in many ways," she said. "I loved the old, old romance of newspapering."
In the history of Rochester newspapering, Exchange Boulevard between Main and Broad (what was then the Erie Canal) was the hub, near government buildings, the courts and lawyers' offices. Gannett and his associates arrived on the Rochester scene in 1918. Owners of newspapers in Elmira, Ithaca and Utica, they bought and combined the daily Daily Union & Advertiser and The Evening Times. He soon bought out his partners and formed Gannett Co. Inc.
The new Times-Union, an afternoon paper, became the leading newspaper in Rochester by 1925, outpacing the morning Democrat and Chronicle — which Gannett bought three years later. The paper at that time cost 3 cents.
While the T-U was in the cluster of other newspapers on Exchange, the D&C had moved some years earlier to a building on the Main Street Bridge. Gannett built 55 Exchange in 1927-28, a building designed by locally renowned architect J. Foster Warner to house the T-U and Gannett's corporate offices. Additions were undertaken in 1949, 1957 (the year Frank Gannett died) and 1977. The newspapers began sharing 55 Exchange in 1959, but maintained separate, fiercely competitive newsrooms in the building — separated by glass partitions and a space nicknamed the DMZ, or demilitarized zone — until the staffs merged in August 1992.
"The D&C got a lot of the stories first, so we either tricked ourselves or flattered ourselves that we were more analytical or investigative," said Jim Memmott, who has worked for both papers in his career. "That may not have been the case."
The T-U, however, could boast of the Pulitzer Prize it won in 1971, for coverage of the Attica prison riots.
Memmott, a retired senior editor with the D&C who writes the paper's Remarkable Rochester column, was first hired by the T-U as "probably the oldest rookie suburban reporter in the history of the paper." He was a 38-year-old former English teacher in 1980, when he began covering Greece and Gates. He would become executive city editor two years later — his advancement expedited by an exodus of editors to Gannett's newly begun USA Today in Arlington, Va. — and managing editor in '86. That was the same year Gannett corporate offices, which already had moved from 55 Exchange to the Lincoln (now Chase) Tower, departed for Arlington.
"I don't think I had ever worked in a building with an elevator before," Memmott said. "That alone was exciting."
But so, too, was the place.
At one time, it housed 1,400 workers — some 250 in the two newsrooms alone.
Giant newsprint rolls arrived by train in the old subway bed beneath West Broad Street. Ink for printing would arrive by truck, and be pumped via a street-level pipe (still encased in a metal box on the West Broad Street sidewalk) into 9,000-gallon storage tanks two stories below. Conveyor belts hauled newspapers up through the floors and back down again. There were, at various times, three different presses in the building. The steel supports of the original presses are still visible in the sub-basem*nt floor.
"It was a tremendous operation," recalled Chris Uhl, who started at Gannett in 1971 as a technician working on the presses. His father was a printer with Gannett for 36 years.
Similar bloodlines run throughout the building's history.
Herm Auch joined the D&C just as it was making the move to 55 Exchange back in 1959. He was a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, which was downtown at the time. He stayed on for the summer after graduation, one of two artists on staff. That summer turned into 40 years. Auch would come to supervise a staff of 12 artists, and watch an industry transform from the era of engravers and black and white to computers and full color. For a time before he retired, he got to work alongside his son, Ian Auch — an experience he refers to as "a joy."
"I loved that," he said of the father-son years. "I loved that building. I loved it being where it was."
"You had generations working here," said Brian Simmons, who started in 1983 as a part-time truck driver. His mom was the accounting manager. "We had a 99-year-lease of the subway (for the newsprint delivery). We thought we were going to be here forever."
The T-U published its final edition on June 27, 1997. That same year, Gannett built a $77 million production and distribution facility at Canal Ponds in Greece, and the newspaper ceased printing downtown.
Shelving units, discarded office furniture and storage boxes now fill the expansive sub-terrain space, where signs still warn of truck traffic and ramps extend to walled-up openings that led to a loading dock in the old subway on the other side.
Today, the Gannett building is home to 225 workers, who next year will make the move to the building under construction on the southeast corner of East Main Street and South Clinton Avenue.
Uhl and Simmons will handle the move, and the cleaning out and eventual handover of 55 Exchange to yet-to-be-named developers.
They are not ones to get sentimental or nostalgic. But inevitably, the conversations with them and others who have worked in the "glorious chaos" turn to the people, quirky and talented, the mishaps that nearly kept the presses from running, and the close saves that got them rolling again, to the events and the stories.
Memmott recalled how he once brought his children to see his office, and joked that they were stunned: "They thought their father had risen in the world, but no, he was working in a factory." That factory has chronicled a city's history, from mafia bombings and shootouts to government scandals, the '64 riots, the '91 ice storm, Sept. 11, 2001, tragedies and victories across the region's cities, towns and villages, historic moments in politics and sport, from the glory days of Eastman Kodak Co., Xerox and Bausch+Lomb, to the struggles of a city still trying to remake itself.
"A lot of history," Uhl said. "A lot of history."
BDSHARP@DemocratandChronicle.com
Share your favorite newspaper clippings
Almost everyone of a certain age, and even many younger families with children, have scrapbooks that hold lovingly clipped articles from the newspaper that mentioned a loved one or marked a momentous occasion.
As the Democrat and Chronicle starts preparing for its move from 55 Exchange Boulevard to its new home at Main and Clinton, we would like to invite readers who have saved moments of their lives by clipping an article from the Times-Union or Democrat and Chronicle to share their keepsake with us.
To share a clipping, post it on Instagram or Twitter and use the hashtag #ROCclips. We will collect them and select some for publication.
Your memories
We asked the followers of the Democrat and Chronicle Facebook page to share some of their memories of 55 Exchange Blvd. Here are a few selected comments:
Michael Allentoff: I remember the excitement in third grade at Paddy Hill Elementary School in Greece when we went on a field trip to 55 Exchange to see the D&C and the TU. In those days the presses were still in the building (now moved to Greece) and we met everyone from reporters to press workers to senior editors. We saw the AP teletype machines printing out stories and the composite plates that were used to print out the paper. It seemed very modern and technologically complex to us.
Bonnie Gray-Frankenberger: I remember the enormous wheels of print paper in the basem*nt. It was so impressive to see the paper being printed and those rolls being changed.
Heidi Marie Patty Cragg: One of my fondest memories is the front entrance turn-style door. My son won an award in photo class for a picture he took of it.
Kevin Kram: I cleaned the windows there for Main Window Cleaning for years and cleaned the press rooms and cleaned the ink off the windows and ledges.
Sue King: Field trip with my class ... the huge rolls of paper in the basem*nt ... enormous down there. All the reporters working hard.
