The New York Amsterdam News, which was founded 115 years ago and has published civil rights leaders, will convert most of its Harlem building into a museum and community space.
The New York Amsterdam News, which was founded 115 years ago and has published civil rights leaders, will convert most of its Harlem building into a museum and community space.
The New York Amsterdam News, which was founded 115 years ago and has published civil rights leaders, will convert most of its Harlem building into a museum and community space.
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a museum that celebrates the way a newspaper in Harlem used to be written and edited. We’ll also get details on New York State’s decision to cut off funding to two private Hasidic Jewish schools in Brooklyn.
Right now there is not much to see in the newspaper building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. There are old typewriters and stacks of reporters’ notebooks on one floor. On another floor are framed front pages with stories about the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013. But, as my colleague Sarah Bahr explains, there are big plans for the space:
This used to be the newsroom of The New York Amsterdam News, the 115-year-old Black newspaper that was once the largest weekly community newspaper in the United States.
But now the newsroom is mostly empty — of people, anyway. The publication’s nine editors and reporters are scattered from Santa Cruz, Calif., to Barcelona, Spain. They have continued to work remotely since the coronavirus pandemic.
So The Amsterdam News is turning the newsroom, and several other floors of its building in Harlem, into a museum.
The left-behind typewriters are hardly the only relics of the way newspapers used to be written and produced. There are metal printing plates and a darkroom from the days when photographs were shot on film and developed with chemicals.