The News

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Former headquarters for the New York Daily News
East 42nd Street
New York, September 2007

“The (former) headquarters for the New York Daily News, on East 42nd Street, is a 1930 skyscraper masterpiece. The enormous lobby, with its illuminated revolving globe and compass points set into the floor, is an impressive monument to wonder and the bigness of the universe, as well as a nod to the newspaper’s global perspective. Then there’s the huge facade framing the 39-story building’s main entrance. This bas relief features the newspaper name, an urban cityscape, and a crowd of people, with this inscription: ‘he made so many of them.’ What does it mean? It’s part of a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: ‘God must love the common people; he made so many of them.’ Sounds like an homage to the regular New Yorkers who made the Daily News, which got its start in 1919 as the city’s first tabloid, one of the nation’s biggest newspapers throughout the 20th century. At the time of the building’s opening, the News had an impressive circulation of 1.3 million. Now it’s roughly half that.” (The mystery quote on the Daily News building, Ephemeral New York)