• Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
    2·
    6 days ago

    This was captured with a DSLR and a 19mm shifting lens. There’s a bit of barrel distortion from the lens, but I decided this image looked better uncorrected.

    The Inquirer building, completed in 1924, to me evokes a cigar-chomping editor who calls everyone “kid” and who says things like “bring me back a scoop”.

    The building had been vacant for a few years when this photo was made, the paper having moved to cheaper and leaner facilities. It has since been repurposed as police headquarters.

    • Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
      2·
      6 days ago

      The Inquirer building also housed (until a few years before they moved) their printing plant, making it one of the last major dailies where it was at least theoretically possible for an editor to run downstairs and yell “stop the presses!” if a major story came in. But I’ll bet that never actually happened.

      • klang@sphere.fx4.net
        1·
        6 days ago

        @mattblaze@federate.social I spent many late night hours in my early teens (1980s) hanging out at a major newspaper facility (my mom often worked late in the art department) so I knew the second shift editors and press operators and how most of the place worked. The senior editors had a button near the city desk and the wire teletypes that would ring a really loud bell in the pressroom, this would notify them to stop the presses as a new front page is being prepared. If in such situations someone else was nearer the button, the editor would aways yell the line at them.

      • BFSMan01@mstdn.plus
        1·
        6 days ago

        @mattblaze@federate.social I like the distortion. It makes it look cartoonish and really works for this image.

    • Legit_Spaghetti 🥥@mastodo.neoliber.al
      1·
      6 days ago

      It has since been repurposed as police headquarters.

      Home, no doubt, to a cigar-chomping police chief who yells things like “You’re a loose cannon, O’Hanrahan!”

      @mattblaze@federate.social