The entity known as the
News American was formed by a final merger of two papers, the
Baltimore News-Post and
The Baltimore Sunday American, in 1964, after a 191-year history and weaning process. Those newspapers each had a long history before the merger, in particular the
Baltimore American which could trace its lineage unbroken to at least 1796, and, traditionally, it claimed even earlier antecedents to 1773. Other precursor newspapers
The News and the
Baltimore Post were founded in 1873 and 1922, respectively, and broke new ground in graphics, technology, journalistic style, and quality of writing and reporting. For most of the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the buildings of the two main newspapers of the city faced each other across South Street along East Baltimore Street, with
The Sun's "Iron Building" of revolutionary cast iron front design reflecting the earliest "skyscraper" construction technique of 1851. Built opposite later in 1873, was
The News office/printing establishment featured a mansard roof and a corner clock tower. Longtime owner/editor
Charles H. Grasty, who bought the
Evening News in 1892, directed the newspaper's coverage of the burgeoning, gritty late-19th Century city, using advanced presses and techniques of graphics, line drawings. and larger headlines in the short days before the advent of printed page photographs. Competing with "the other paper" across the street, bulletin boards, chalk boards across the second floor front of the building and hawking "newsies" (newspaper delivery boys) with the latest news, telegraphed election results made the intersection the hottest place to be in the Victorian downtown central district. All this perished in smoke with the "
Great Baltimore Fire" of February 1904, which burned out both buildings. Publication was temporarily shifted to other neighboring cities such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Charles and Baltimore Streets, at the geographic center of Baltimore, became the site of a new marble Beaux Arts classical-style publishing offices for
The Sun papers for the next 45 years. The corner was nicknamed "Sun Square." The
Baltimore American had a towering office skyscraper, the American Building, quickly rebuilt on the same site with a distinctive elaborate green ground floor with gold lettering showing the newspaper's logo and masthead and the dates 1773 and 1904 over the doorways. An additional printing plant several blocks south was located on East Pratt between South and Commerce streets, facing what then was called "The Basin" and its wharves, and today is known as the Inner Harbor. It, too, was built after the 1904 Great Fire, which devastated most of downtown Baltimore. An additional office building a block north, facing East Lombard Street, was built later in 1924 and supplemented with a more modern printing plant between the two buildings along the South Street side in 1965 after the final merger of the
News-Post and
the American. The South Street complex was torn down several years after the newspaper's closing in 1986, and remained a parking lot and a source of controversy for Inner Harbor area redevelopment. With the construction of a massive tower initially named Commerce Place on the block between South and Commerce streets in 1991, the intersection and battleground of Baltimore and South Streets (and intersecting North Street [later Guilford Avenue]) are now relatively unknown for the "Newspaper Wars" that ebbed and flowed there through most of the 1800s. The tower was later renamed and made headquarters for the longtime local investment/financial/banking firm
Alex. Brown & Sons following its takeover by Germany's
Deutsche Bank. Another casualty of "The Great Fire" was the
Baltimore Morning Herald. It had been founded in February 1900 and combined with the
Baltimore Evening Herald on August 31, 1904, six months after its headquarters building at the northwestern corner of
St. Paul and East Fayette Streets was consumed by the blaze. The massive
City Circuit Courthouse (now the
Clarence Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse) just to the east across the street, completed four years earlier, was unharmed. The paper's young editor, employed for four years since graduating from
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute,
Henry Louis Mencken was displaced from his office and arrangements had to be made to print the paper in another city and ship it back into Baltimore. Several years later, in June 1906,
The Herald was bought out by competitors Grasty and his
News joined with Gen.
Felix Agnus, owner/publisher of
The Baltimore American and the staff, assets and resources divided between the two older papers that were now the largest in the city. Mencken described his early reporting years in the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy
Newspaper Days published in 1941.
Baltimore Post • 1922–1929:
Baltimore Daily Post • 1929–1934:
Baltimore Post Baltimore News-Post • 1934–1936:
Baltimore News and the Baltimore Post (formed by merger of
News and
Post) • 1936–1964:
Baltimore News-Post The News American • 1964–1986:
The News American (formed by merger of
Baltimore News-Post [published Monday to Saturday] and
Baltimore American [then published only on Sundays]). The revamped
News American was published seven days a week with the usually thick special Sunday edition of many sections. The masthead was redesigned with a new vignette with the old
Phoenix Shot Tower in the center and the city skyline buildings behind, surmounted by the traditional Hearst stylized eagle. For the first time, the paper was referred to without the city name on the masthead. A new printing presses plant structure was constructed in the center of the block between East Pratt and East Lombard Streets. It joined previous structures facing opposite directions with loading docks on the east side facing Commerce Street and a large brick wall facing the South Street side on the west. A huge anodized aluminum name plate was attached, visible from both streets and passing traffic, next to a new entrance lobby (with exhibits and display boards with history of the newspapers). Entrances on Pratt and Lombard were closed. The paper used a new postal address on South Street. ==Notable personnel==