Print City: How Newspaper Buildings Shaped Philadelphia's Downtown
Join us for the continuation of the series honoring The McLean Contributionship’s long-standing commitment to the field of journalism and supporting access to our Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Collection. This year's McLean lecture features Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia, like other big American cities, was once home to dozens of print newspapers. These papers exhibited a strong pack mentality (much like journalists themselves) and set up their offices in close proximity to one another, often on the same block, forming distinct media enclaves or newspaper rows. Newspapers frequently used their buildings as a form of advertising and constructed ever grander works of architecture in an effort to distinguish themselves and attract readers. They also turned their buildings in semi-public places where people gathered to celebrate, protest and exchange information. But as local newspapers have died off, many of these buildings have been lost. Like so many products we consume, we have no idea any longer where our news originates, and that’s one reason it has become increasingly difficult to separate the real from the fake. The research for this talk comes from a forthcoming history of American newspaper buildings provisionally titled, Building the News.
The McLean Contributionship Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Endowed Lecture Series is generously supported by The McLean Contributionship.
- Date:
- Thursday, April 17, 2025
- Time:
- 2:30pm - 4:30pm
- Location:
- Charles Library Event Space
- Location:
- Online
- Campus:
- Main Campus
Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For more than 20 years, she has been a forceful advocate for meaningful design, accessible public spaces and transit, affordable housing, historic preservation and policies that make our cities more liveable and climate resilient. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum, a 2012 Loeb Fellowship from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Inga began her career as a municipal reporter in New Jersey, and went on to become a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the 1990s, she covered wars in Yugoslavia and Russia, where she witnessed the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. She has published two books: Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again, a selection of her Inquirer columns, and Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy, a cultural history of the sturgeon. She is currently working on a social and architectural history of the American newspaper building, tentatively titled Building the News: How Newspaper Buildings Shaped the American City.
