NEW ORLEANS — Walt Philbin began a nearly 40-year career in local journalism in 1973 as a cub reporter on the afternoon States-Item.
The retired police reporter remembers the chaotic scenes as reporters and editors raced to beat the clock as four deadlines a day breathed down their necks.
“Everybody would be going so crazy on deadline to get it in the paper and yelling and I just - the tension and the joy of deadline reporting and all. I mean, there was so much juice going on. And then election night here? Oh, God!” he remembered.
But the fond memories were tempered by the reality that the newsroom where those stories were written will soon be no more.
"That building -- that's the symbol of it all being torn down now,” Philbin said.
For two weeks now, massive machines have slowly chewed away at the building, which opened in 1968 to much acclaim as one of the most modern newspaper plants in the country. In recent years, it had become a canvas for graffiti artists and vandals after the last employees left in 2016.
On Monday, almost one half of the building was already reduced to rubble. The other half had entire walls missing, and individual floors were being torn out bit by bit.
Once the building is gone in two or three months, a Drive Shack will be built in its place. The high-tech driving range is expected to open in late 2020.
The loss of the old newspaper building comes as the city gets a new newspaper. On Monday, the first edition of The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate hit the streets.
The combined newspaper came to be after the Newhouse family, which had owned The Picayune since 1962, sold the paper and its website, NOLA.com, to John and Dathel Georges, owners of The Advocate.
Former Times-Picayune higher education reporter John Pope, who also began at The States-Item, said it hurts to see the place he called a second home for so many years go away so slowly.
"I have ridden out hurricanes at the building. I flirted with the woman whom I wound up marrying in that building. And I was in the room when … we learned we had won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Katrina. And we were jumping up and down and hollering and sobbing all at the same time,” Pope said. “There are so many memories in that building, I just hate to see it in its ruined state. It just needs to be done away with as quickly as possible."