1868 Shannon and Rogers View Printing House Square (Park Row), New York City

This is a beautiful 1868 Shannon and Rogers view of the Printing House Square or what is today Park Row near the southern triangle of City Hall Park, New York City by Shannon and Rogers. It depicts what was at the time known as Printing House Square, a concentrated hub of newspaper publishing from the 1840s, as seen from City Hall Park. The Times building can be seen on the right, at the time the most prominent building on the square. The Times would later move to 42nd Street and lend its name to Long Acre Square or Times Square, as it is known today. Located close to City Hall and the courthouses as well as the city’s main post office (from the 1870s), the various publications and newspapers had easy and quick access to news and information. Black smoke, presumably from the printing presses in the basement of some of these buildings, can be seen rising from the chimneys. Signs on the facade indicate the offices of ‘The Sun’, The Tribune’, ‘Sunday Times’, ‘The World’, and other publications in the buildings. The foreground of the view features people strolling in City Hall Park. Lawyer and reformer Frank Moss, in his book The American Metropolis from Knickerbocker Days to the Present Time describes Printing House Square:

Every great event for fifty years past has been watched for and learned from the bulletin boards, by throngs assembled in this square. Here, when newspapers have prepared to show election news, is the place to see New York at it's best and its worst.

The square will ever be famous as the place where The Great American Newspaper has had its development. Greeley, Raymond, Dana, Jones, and many others, hardly less famous, have done their life work here, and have enriched the nation and the world by it.

This view was prepared for inclusion in the 1868 edition of Joseph Shannon's Manual of The Corporation of the City of New York.