The Press: Underground

Hard by the Manhattan entrance to Brooklyn Bridge and facing the City Hall, stands the Pulitzer Building. Thirty-seven years ago this building was proudly reared by Joseph Pulitzer, superlatively able parent of the present Pulitzers, proprietors of the World. Atop the building glints the famed gold dome, and that remains the same. The deep intestines of the building have been changed. Four years ago executives perceived that equipment in printing, paper and production had exceeded the capacity of the pressrooms. Uneven quality of paper and shaky printing made no daily match for the immaculately dressed Times and Herald-Tribune. Discarding a possibility of deserting the traditional building, the proprietors decreed a new pressroom. In quarters so cramped that two famed manufacturers refused the contract, an entirely new equipment has been laboriously installed. New presses; the moving of a colossal switchboard required the encroachments of a subway under one corner of the structure; a redesigned paper storage cavern stretching far under Brooklyn Bridge were bit by bit purchased, made room for and set scientifically in place. Four years this process required. Last week it was completed. In all the years not one edition or one mail train was missed by a paper plant working 24 hours a day to publish a morning and evening newspaper to the sum of 700,000 daily copies.