May 22, 1937 – The Iowa City Press-Citizen Celebrates.

***On Saturday, May 22, 1937 – The Iowa City Press-Citizen celebrated the formal opening of their new, state-of-the-art building located at 319 East Washington Street in downtown Iowa City.***

***And what’s the best way for a city newspaper to celebrate a special occasion?***

***May 22, 1937 – The 92-page Souvenir New Building Edition – The Largest Newspaper Ever Published in Johnson County!***

*A record that (as best we can determine) still stands today!* Just for the record – on July 1, 1939, the Press-Citizen published a 76-page edition to celebrate Iowa City’s Centennial, and on July 1, 1976, another 76-page edition was published to celebrate America’s Bicentennial. So, this 92-page edition in 1937 beat both of those big editions by 16 pages!

Our goal on this web page is not to give you a reproduction of every one of the 92 pages. (You can do that with a subscription to Newspapers.com, and by clicking right here). But, we do want to offer a few select pages to give you a taste of what this special 1937 edition was all about. So here goes…

At the bottom of page one, all of the characters from the daily comic section (below left) join in the celebration!

After 20 pages of the normal-sized daily paper, the New Building Edition kicked off with a full-page picture of the new P-C facility on Washington Street…

***Here’s Section A – Page One – which features a large photograph of the new, state-of-the-art Press-Citizen building.***

Further on in the New Building Edition – on page 62 – readers were given a bit of history…

**The Iowa City Press-Citizen** can trace its roots back to the 1840’s and the very first newspaper to publish here: **The Iowa Standard**. For more details on the earliest days of Iowa City newspapers, click here.

When we fast forward from the 1840’s to the turn-of-the-century, The Iowa City Press-Citizen was formed in 1920 from the merger of two popular city newspapers: The Iowa City Daily Press – founded in 1860 and representing the political views of the Democrat Party, and The Iowa City Daily Citizen – founded in 1891 and leaning strongly toward Republican politics. You can read more here. Above: The last editions of The Daily Press and The Daily Citizen were published on October 30, 1920. Below: The first edition of The Iowa City Press-Citizen that rolled off the presses on November 1, 1920…

In 1921, Merritt Spiedel bought The Press-Citizen, and by the mid-1930’s, had hired one of Iowa City’s first registered architects – Henry L. Fisk (pictured below) as the consulting architect, working alongside Kruse & Klein Moderne to create a Streamline Moderne-style building to house his growing newspaper business. Located at 319 E. Washington Street (see map below), The Press-Citizen building opened in May of 1937, and, at the time, was a state-of-the-art newspaper-production facility – one of the finest across the Midwest.

A great majority of the first 60 pages of the New Building Edition offered dozens of articles and photographs informing readers about the new facility and how the daily newspaper is produced. As you can see from Page Eight below, the building was designed with three floors. The first and second floors were set up, primarily, for staff writers, general offices, and pre-production work, while the basement was where the newspaper was printed, and distribution into delivery trucks occurred.

Pages Ten through Twelve (below) focused on the construction process on Washington Street…

Section B had dozens of stories and pictures of the state-of-the-art equipment found within the P-C production areas…

(Above left) “Moving day, moving the equipment of the production department into the new building was an exacting task, and the hardest job of all was moving the delicate line composing machines. This picture shows the workers as they slowly edged one of the machines, each of which consists of thousands of parts, from the moving truck.” (Above right) “Paper storage, a large portion of the basement in the new Press-Citizen building is utilized as a storage space for newsprint. The large rolls of paper are unloaded on the platform in an area which will store two and one-half carloads of paper when the roll are laid flat and six carloads of paper when the huge rolls are set on end. The paper storage room is located across a portion of the front end of the basement and adjacent to the sub-structure of the press which facilities moving the large rolls to their positions on the press.”

(Above left) “This is the new 24-page Goss press installed in the Press-Citizen building. It is equipped with three color units and is the latest development of the printing press.”

**(Above)** “Through the lookout, perhaps the most interesting place in the new Press-Citizen building to the visitor is the vantage point on the balcony above the lobby where, through large soundproof windows, he may watch the north wall of the shop and look out on the top of the press. When the mechanical department is in full operation, the visitor may watch the speed and accurate precision which characterizes the work in this room and get a bird’s eye view of the co-ordination of all the professes through which news must go from the time it leaves the editorial room until it appears on the printed page, ready for the reader.”

(Above left) “A view of the production department of the Press-Citizen is seen from the west end looking toward the composing section and line casting machines.” (Above right) “This is a perspective of the production department of the newspaper, looking from the east end over the make-up tables toward the new press.”

Press-Citizen owner Merritt Spiedel wanted his new building to be seen as a modern-day classic, thus he asked architect Henry L. Fisk to include nice touches like this creative bas-relief frieze (see above) placed two stories above the impressive glass-block entryway.

Once inside, visitors were greeted by the colorful mural – Symphony of Iowa – created by the Iowa City artist Mildred W. Pelzer (see below).

**Symphony of Iowa 1833-1933** (1935) This amazing 80″ x 121″ oil-on-canvas mural was painted for the Iowa City Press-Citizen owner Merritt Speidel, which he hung in the lobby of the newspaper’s new art-deco building (1937) in downtown Iowa City. The mural, which celebrates Iowa’s rich heritage, was restored in 1966 by Forrest Bailey, who was commissioned by Richard Feddersen for the work. The painting was later donated by Fedderson to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. *Read more about other murals by Mildred W. Pelzer.*

The final third of the New Building Edition (pp 60-92) contained countless articles and photographs reviewing the long history of Johnson County and Iowa City…

Below are pages dedicated to our rich Transportation Heritage in Johnson County – from steamboats to railroads to automobiles to airplanes…

So, there you have it. A brief overview of this spectacular 92-page edition of The Iowa City Press-Citizen – published on May 22, 1937, as the newspaper was moving into its new building. Pictured below is a penny postcard from the 1940’s that features a beautiful sketch of the facility at 319 East Washington Street…

*(P-0374)* *The Press-Citizen building as it appeared in the 1940’s*.

As the newspaper industry began to drastically change – with the transition to computerized news gathering – the Press-Citizen no longer needed such a large production facility, and in 1991, moved to a smaller building on North Dodge Street. In recent years, the Press-Citizen building has been re-modeled, becoming Citizen Building Apartments – a low-income housing option in downtown Iowa City.

Above right – one of the old bas-relief cement molds (above right) from the Iowa City Press-Citizen Building hung in the newsroom after it moved to Brewery Square at 123 N. Linn Street in Iowa City. But sadly, the P-C closed that office in April 2023. Today, all of the archives, including print, digital and office materials have been moved to a facility in Des Moines owned by Gannett Media Company.

No longer what she once was – The Iowa City Press-Citizen Building has now transitioned, and the P-C itself no longer has an Iowa City office. Gone, but never forgotten…