The Sprite Who Watched the Magazine Fold

High above the entrance on your right, a gilded statue of a grinning, impish figure still looks down on the street, a leftover from the building's first life. This structure went up in eighteen eighty five and eighteen eighty six for the men behind Puck, a satirical magazine named for the mischievous sprite from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and they paid one hundred forty thousand dollars for the land alone, a serious sum for the time. The statue above the Lafayette Street doorway was carved by sculptor Henry Baerer and originally carried a line pulled straight from the play, What fools these mortals be, a fitting motto for a magazine built entirely on mocking the powerful.

Puck had started a decade earlier as a German language humor publication before switching to English, and by around eighteen eighty its circulation had grown to roughly eighty thousand copies, with its lithographed political cartoons shaping how an entire generation of Americans pictured corrupt politicians and the officials around them. At its peak, something like four hundred people worked inside this building producing the magazine every week.

It could not last forever. The Hearst organization bought Puck in nineteen seventeen, and the magazine folded for good the following year, done in by changing tastes and the rise of other illustrated weeklies. The building stayed in use for printing businesses for decades afterward, largely overlooked, until a renovation beginning in the late nineteen seventies brought it back into the spotlight. The sprite above the door, though, never left, still grinning down at a street that has long since forgotten most of what he was put there to mock.