That’s the New York World building on Park Row, briefly the tallest building in the world and a structure I’ve written about at some length. A side question that I more or less knew the answer to but have never addressed is how a newspaper had enough money to build that building.
The World was, along with its competitor, the New York Journal-American, a source of “yellow journalism,” a precursor to the tabloid journalism of the twentieth century. There have always been newspapers in the US that were biased and published misleading or poorly-sourced articles, but yellow journalism took this a step further, using photos and other illustrations to create images that were not necessarily in agreement with the stories, using blatantly false headlines, and deliberately ignoring fact-checking. The two papers were engaged in a circulation war, and both gained readers with their sensationalism. One of the ironies of history is that the Journal-American‘s owner, William Randolph Hearst, has been repeatedly vilified in both fiction and non-fiction, while the World‘s owner, Joseph Pulitzer, somehow has his name associated with journalistic integrity.
The sensationalism of the World occasionally had good reporting, but most of it was horrific. In light of current events, Mike Wallace recently put up an except from his bookGreater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 on the website of the Gotham Center for New York History. The excerpt concerns a riot that took place in August 1900. As Wallace writes:
Arthur Harris, a 22-year-old, Virginia-born recent migrant, sought refuge at McBride’s Saloon on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, just down the block from the apartment in which he lived with his girlfriend, 20-year-old May Enoch. At 2:00 a.m., Enoch came by, asked him to “come on up home,” then waited outside for him to join her. On departing, Harris found her struggling in a man’s grip. He leapt to rescue her. The man produced a club and began battering him, shouting racist epithets. Harris pulled a knife and cut his assailant twice. Robert J. Thorpe, a plainclothes policeman who had been arresting Enoch for presumed soliciting, fell mortally wounded.
Harris was black. Thorpe was white. Three nights later the neighborhood exploded.
The riot consisted of whites, both ordinary people and the police, attacking blacks. However the articles in World suggested that the reverse was true, and thus not only erased the harm done to the black community, it created a threat where none existed. The stomach-turning coverage by the World is online, complete with fiction published as truth.
Not everything in the past is tainted in the manner of the World, but it’s not a bad idea to always check when researching, even if it’s just researching the building your subject occupied.
