HAMILTON IN TOWN! AT THE NEW PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
GET PHYSICAL HEALTH IN A PANDEMIC?
STOP THE PRESSES THE BEE QUITS Q STREET
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ADVENTURES BEYOND TASTING Falcons, boats, food, history—even a gold mine )
More than just
SACMAG.COM SEPTEMBER 2021
WINE
END OF THE RUN
WHEN MARK WALTERS started his job at The Sacramento Bee about two decades ago, roughly 3,000 employees filtered through the building that was open seven days a week, 24 hours a day. When all four massive press units were running, Walters recalled, the building shook. For five months, since the presses last rolled Jan. 30, the building that housed The Bee at 21st and Q streets underwent a massive decommissioning process. In the weeks that followed, cutting torches ripped apart the three-and-a-half-story presses into scrap metal. Huge machines reached through a gaping hole in the side of the press room to lift out the steel units that littered a former parking lot like tombstones in a western graveyard. By July 31—when there was no trace of The Bee left inside—the 390,000-square-foot building had become a ghost town.
BY JAN HAAG PHOTOGRAPHY BY DICK SCHMIDT
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July 29, 2021 A worker uses a metal scrape tool to remove decades of pressroom ink sludge in the final days of a five-month project to remove the massive Bee presses for scrap metal.
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June 17, 2021 The Sacramento Bee’s facilities manager, Mark Walters, in the courtyard as it appeared for decades.
July 2, 2021 Exterior after its name had been removed.
THE SACRAMENTO BEE consisted of adjoining facilities occupying 7 acres, two full city blocks—the 21st and Q Street building that opened in 1952, which housed administration, sales and the newsroom, and the newer production building with printing presses built in 1982. Walters, the Bee’s facilities manager, has overseen the taking apart after “being responsible for the physical building—every nut and bolt,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to count ’em, but there’s a lot of them. I was responsible for HVAC, compressed air, vacuum systems, all systems. I was also in charge of security and fire, life and safety. What didn’t I do?” After The Bee building was sold in 2017 to Shopoff Realty Investments, a Southern California company, the newspaper became a tenant in its own home. When the pandemic sent between 600 and 700 employees home in March 2020, the building sat mostly empty, Walters said, until the decommissioning began in February 2021. By the end of July about 10 people roamed the cavernous space where a full press once held 96 rolls of newsprint—each one weighing up to 1,500–1,600 pounds, about 8 miles of paper. “If you put all the paper we ran end to end, it would go to the moon and back twoand-a-half times,” Walters said, recalling that at one point the paper’s slogan on its delivery trucks read, “Miss a day, miss a lot.” In recent years, though, he added, “We were printing DTE—dead tree editions. We all know paper is fragile, but if you tuck it away in the dark, it’ll survive for a long time. Will this digital stuff be here in 2,000 years?” The Bee has moved to much smaller offices at The Cannery on Alhambra Boulevard with most of its staff working offsite. The paper is now printed in Fremont and trucked to Sacramento for daily distribution. As the last man out the door, Walters spoke with great pride of the end of the run. “It was the best job I ever had in my life,” Walters said. “The organization was great. I love all the people. I had a wonderful time every day.”
Feb. 26, 2021 For nearly 70 years, the hub of intensive news gathering, writing, editing and content creativity, the 2nd floor newsroom had, in its time, unending activity, hubbub and fervor.
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Feb. 26, 2021 Machines for sorting, insertions, bundling and packaging make up an extensive post-press area of The Bee’s production facility, forever quiet after the last press run on Jan. 30.
July 21, 2021 Once a hotbed of frantic action, noise and activity, the post-press facility had everything removed and cleaned for the building to be turned over to the owner.
July 29, 2021 Once the vibrant heart and soul of The Sacramento Bee’s news-gathering mission, the newsroom sits forever dark prior to the building turning over to its owner. SACMAG.COM September 2021
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Feb. 26, 2021 The first unit of The Bee’s presses starts the dismantling process, with workers using cutting torches with up to a 6-foot reach, to take apart the massive steel machines.
May 6, 2021 “The pressroom is bleeding”: After removal of an entire line of presses, magenta ink remains where supply lines feeding one unit had been cut in preparation for demolition.
May 6, 2021 Half way through the removal of the presses, debris piles up.
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March 25, 2021 On the floor beneath the presses, in the building’s basement, rotating reels would feed huge rolls of newsprint upward into the roaring printing presses.
July 21, 2021 The empty pressroom, after all the presses, offices and control rooms had been removed for recycling into scrap metal, measures 3½ stories high from basement floor to ceiling.
July 21, 2021 The pressroom, occupying a space half a block long, is gutted.
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