There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don’t mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that’s provisional, and purely functional, if barely—your Meadowlands, your Knights of Columbus halls, your strip malls. These are dumps, but our dumps. Among my own cherished dumps are old newsrooms. My first was the Trentonian, a New Jersey tabloid that’s still limping along, though its former headquarters, where I worked, now houses a gypsum-supply company. It had thin carpet, retro computers, and too much space for too few people, like the Macrodata Refinement floor on “Severance.” Here was a building without pretense: tan bricks, very few windows. The parking lot was enclosed by barbed-wire fencing. It looked, I guess, like somewhere you might store gypsum. It could’ve been worse. In the paper’s previous building, the newsroom was on the third floor, just above where the pressmen boiled lead in barrels. It got so hot up there that some reporters worked shirtless. A few blocks down Perry Street was the rival broadsheet, the Times of Trenton. The Trentonian hated the Times. The Times had a slightly bigger building, with a bigger sign, neon red, in the logo’s blocky gothic font. The building is still around. For a while, it was a warehouse for concrete products.
