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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