A venerable publishing firm whose history is bound up with that of Lower Manhattan is asking for some acknowledgement (in the form of a street corner renaming), but Community Board 1 (CB1) is saying, “not so fast.”
HarperCollins Publishers began life as J. & J. Harper in 1817, when brothers James and John (having been inspired by “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin” to take up printing) borrowed money from their father, a successful farmer, and bought presses, which enabled them to launch a printing house at the corner of Dover and Front Streets. Within a year, they had realized there was more money to be made in owning original works than reproducing existing volumes, and they were off to the races. In less than a decade, two more siblings, Wesley and Fletcher, had come aboard as parters, and the firm was rechristened as Harper & Brothers.
Where It All Began: The Harper Brothers headquarters at Franklin Square (approximately where the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage is now located) in the 1850s.
It soon branched out into magazines (such as Harper’s, and Harper’s Bazaar, both of which continue to publish today). So successful were the brothers that they hired cast-iron architecture pioneer James Bogardus to build them the 1850s equivalent of a skyscraper (five stories tall) on Franklin Square, near the now-vanished confluence of Pearl, Dover, and Cherry Streets — a site today occupied by the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Wealth brought political influence, and James Harper was elected mayor of New York in 1844. During his term, New York organized its first municipal police force, which Harper insisted make itself identifiable by dressing in blue uniforms. (Officers groused that this made them targets for violent criminals, and tried to pass themselves off in street clothing whenever they could get away with it.)
Even after James Harper left City Hall, the brothers continued to wield power through their publications, employing cartoonist Thomas Nast (whom they paid a staggering $170 per week) to bring down William Marcy “Boss” Tweed. They also exerted an ongoing influence on American culture, keeping painter Winslow Homer on staff for many years. (He was paid only $50 per week — still a tidy sum in an era when carpenters took home about $11 each Friday.) But the firm’s biggest impact and legacy always consisted of books: In 1851, the firm published Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” and 44 years later, it released Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — two among hundreds of classic titles that Harper would eventually bring to readers.
Harper Brothers remained in Lower Manhattan through the 1920s, after which a series of mergers moved the firm uptown. (Along the way, it became Harper and Row, and then HarperCollins.) But the company returned to its roots in 2014, after signing a long-term lease for a new global headquarters at 195 Broadway, at the corner of Dey Street.
HarperCollins executive Angela Tribelli proposes to Community Board 1 that the intersection of Broadway and Dey (outside of 195 Broadway) be renamed HarperCollins Way.
“We have spent 110 years of our 200 year history in Lower Manhattan,” noted Angela Tribelli, the chief marketing officer for HarperCollins, at the October 25 monthly meeting of CB1. She was there to make the case for the publisher’s request to rename the corner of Broadway and Dey as “HarperCollins Way,” to memorialize the company’s homecoming in time for its bicentennial year. Ms. Tribelli also noted, “our social responsibility mission runs deep,” as she enumerated a roster of not-for-profits that the company supports.
The Home Office: The publishing firm HarperCollins recently move back to Lower Manhattan, after a 90 year hiatus, and is now headquartered at 195 Broadway.
But CB1’s Financial District Committee was unpersuaded. As Committee co-chair Michael Ketring noted at the October 25 meeting, “although I was personally in favor of this, the committee’s sense was they’ve only been back two years, and there would be too many corporate citizens coming forward to rename different street corners.”
For this reason, CB1 passed a resolution urging HarperCollins, “to return in the future after they have been located in Lower Manhattan for a longer period of time. In the interim, the company will have to content itself with Harper Avenue, a six-block thoroughfare in the Edenwald section of the Bronx that is named for the former mayor.