The Sound Of News

David Dunlap with a farewell: LISTEN. The sound is muffled by wall-to-wall carpet tiles and fabric-lined cubicles. But it's still there, embedded in the concrete and steel sinews of the old factory at 229 West 43rd Street, where The New York Times was written and edited yesterday for the last time.

It is the sound of news, dispatched to and from the third-floor newsroom since 1913, the first year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. It is the noise of physical exertion: the staccato rapping of manual typewriters, hundreds of them; the insistent chatter of news-agency teleprinters, marshaled by the dozens. It is bells and loudspeakers, the cry of "Copy!" to summon youngsters who carried each page of a reporter's story across the room to impatient editors, and the whoosh of cylinders pulsing through pneumatic tubes overhead with edited copy on its way to the fourth-floor composing room.