Today I spent a couple of hours in a basement archive belonging to the New York Times. It was a complete throwback to a non-digital time, and really fun!
A friend at the paper connected me with Jeff Roth, the last remaining steward of the paper’s ‘morgue,’ who gave me a private tour (see The Times’ 2017 article about Jeff and the morgue).
It’s fantastic that this archive still exists, when most others have been thrown out or consigned to remote storage. Here, within a short walk of The Times newsroom, there are file cabinets, clippings and reference books galore. Not to mention many very cool relics that Jeff saved from the trash heap when The Times moved out of its old building in 2007.
Many thanks to Jeff for his time, his great storytelling, and for letting me take these photos.
