In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
Any corporate facilities director faces huge challenges. But Patrick G. Whelan, who retired this month after 44 years at The New York Times, oversaw the extraction of a 9,400-pound, Art Deco-style polished granite frieze from the facade of the newspaper’s old headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street.
Colleagues at his retirement party recalled Mr. Whelan, 66, as deeply knowledgeable and perpetually unfazed. However, he acknowledged in an interview that it had taken two nights, instead of one, to pry the 11½-by-4⅔-foot frieze from its perch over the 43rd Street entrance in 2006. It was relocated to the lobby of the Times Center, at 242 West 41st Street, in the new Times Building.
Mr. Whelan’s family has been at The Times since the 1950s, when his uncle, William F. Treacy, was the chief engineer at one of the paper’s printing plants. Mr. Whelan was hired in 1981 as an operating engineer. He became the facilities director in 2008. Now he’ll tackle long-postponed projects at his home in River Vale, N.J., which he shares with his wife, Carol. Their daughter was an intern at The Times. One son worked at The Times. The other was married on the roof of the Times Building.
Handling artifacts for the Museum at The Times — like a copper gargoyle from the Times Tower of 1905 or the founding editor’s writing desk — has been among Mr. Whelan’s many jobs. The excision of the frieze stood out for its sheer size.
The sculpture, in high relief, was commissioned by the pre-eminent industrial architect Albert Kahn for the entrance to a Times printing plant in Brooklyn that opened in 1930. It shows a globe, centered on North America, flanked by allegorical figures of Enlightenment (female) and Printing (male). Beneath the figures, in 3½-inch-high letters, is The Times’s motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
Corrado Parducci, an Italian-American sculptor who lived from 1900 to 1981, was “very, very likely” responsible for the frieze, said Dale A. Carlson, the co-author of “Corrado Parducci: A Field Guide to Detroit’s Architectural Sculptor.”
Some time after the Brooklyn plant closed in 1932, the sculpture was moved to Manhattan and reinstalled over the main entrance of the newspaper’s headquarters, just west of Times Square, where it remained until 2006.
“I have discovered over 30 more Parduccis since publishing my book of his commissions in 2020,” Mr. Carlson said in an email this month, after he learned about the Times commission. “This is another great addition.”
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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