Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The Reporters of City Hall Return to Their Old Perch

Israel Rivera, from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, moved a desk assigned to The New York Post from the press trailer to renovated press rooms in City Hall.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

It once housed drunkards, lunatics and louts. And that was before the reporters showed up.

Room 9, the cramped reporters’ chamber tucked into a former courtroom for inebriates inside City Hall, has been the cluttered home to the city’s newsmen and, eventually, women, since the days of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’s troubled administration, which began in the 1860s.

A journalistic institution, the room returned to life on Thursday for the first time in two years, ending the first city-imposed exile of its rumpled press corps, part of a $106 million renovation of the 200-year-old building.

As bleary-eyed reporters struggled to connect phone lines, some returning denizens yearned for the decorative relics, still in storage, like former Mayor John V. Lindsay’s straw hat and cane and framed caricatures of another former mayor, Abraham D. Beame, that once festooned the mint-colored, 14-foot-high walls.

Maggie Haberman, a reporter for Politico, said she approved of the newly refreshed space. “It was incredibly clean,” she said, hours after moving back in. “I think it’s O.K. for Room 9 to not look disgusting.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg moved the press from the space, consigning reporters to a makeshift trailer outside the City Hall steps, for what was supposed to be a year and a half. It ended up taking 23 months, a delay that the mayor’s office attributed to the vicissitudes of construction and that reporters joked must have been part of a conspiracy to hinder their coverage.

Image
A reporter prepared a box to be moved.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

In fact, the city was keenly sensitive to any perceived slights on the part of the displaced journalists. The mayor’s office considered installing the trailer farther away from City Hall, along nearby Broadway, but abandoned the plan after sensing that reporters might criticize the mayor for all but kicking them out, a city official said.

Some of the reporters dragging in boxes on Thursday were new faces: several online-only outlets have desks in City Hall for the first time. And nearly all of Room 9 is now expected to blog, post to Twitter and edit video on high-definition monitors, far different tasks from those assigned to pre-Twitter predecessors.

New York’s City Hall, completed in 1812, is the oldest continuously operating government building of its kind in the country, so it is not a stretch to say that Room 9 may be the longest-serving City Hall bureau in American journalism. Generations of reporters have scrambled for scoops beneath its Georgian windows, and enjoyed the direct access it provides to the mayor and the City Council speaker, whose office sits directly across the hall.

Not every mayor has appreciated the close quarters. Shortly before he was elected in 2001, Mr. Bloomberg opined that he would prefer the press corps to be stationed on Staten Island, adding, “You can take the bus.”

Other mayors, however, said they enjoyed the relationships that stem from an in-house press room. Edward I. Koch said he liked to stop by and banter with reporters, even if there were “a lot of cockroaches” in the room. (Mr. Koch clarified that he was referring to the bugs, not the reporters.)

 Asked if he envied Mr. Bloomberg’s trailer setup, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he would be jealous “only if you get rid of them for good.”

Image
 Room 9 of City Hall in 1987.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

 “But if they’re going to be there,” Mr. Giuliani added, with a laugh, “they might as well be close by. Keep a watch on ’em.”

 At 455 square feet, Room 9 is no larger than a studio apartment, yet it will house 16 reporters from the city’s major daily newspapers and wire services. An overflow space, Room 4A, sits directly below and will include desks for online outlets like Capital New York and DNAinfo.com.

 “We wanted to get a space to work down there where it’s less noisy than a Starbucks, or less inconvenient than City Hall Park,” said Michael Ventura, the managing editor of DNAinfo.com.

 Still, Mr. Ventura said he hoped his correspondent would avoid the groupthink that can plague political bureaus. “I don’t want her to fall into the pack or anything like that,” he said.

 And some of the built-in benefits of Room 9, like a dedicated phone line and quick access to lawmakers, can be less critical in an age where news releases arrive via e-mail and news conferences are often streamed online.

 “It’s somewhere between necessary and academic to be there now,” said Josh Benson, co-editor of Capital New York.

Image
Workers from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services moved a desk for The New York Post back to Room 9.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

 The advent of digital news is not the only change that Room 9 has weathered over the years. Before 1868, “the room was a court with jurisdiction over drunkards and lunatics,” according to a 1984 account in The New York Times, which cited a city-sponsored exhibit about the history of City Hall.

The “Room 9” moniker apparently dates to the turn of the 20th century; before that, the room was known as Room 13. Local historians and former denizens of the bureau could not account for the change.

The room, in its midcentury heyday, had the feel of a scene from “The Front Page,” the old Broadway comedy about tabloid reporters. Cigarette smoke and the sound of typewriters filled the air. As late as the 1960s, a spiral staircase offered fire-pole access to the basement room below.

 “People used to go downstairs, there was a couch, and they could sleep off whatever it is that they had imbibed,” recalled George Arzt, who worked for years in Room 9, first as a reporter and later as a press secretary for Mr. Koch.

The city said it had brought Room 9 up to modern fire codes and made fixes to its cranky heating and cooling system.

On Thursday, reporters took note of the oddly bright paint job and discussed whether the linoleum floor, previously bumpy and angled, had been smoothed out. With the press corps still migrating back, the room seemed almost neat and tidy — a situation that, several journalists joked, would be rectified in very short order.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: The Reporters of City Hall Return to Their Old Perch. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT