Sacramento Union
Encyclopedia
The Sacramento Union was a daily newspaper
founded in 1851 in Sacramento, California
. It was the oldest daily newspaper west of the Mississippi River before it closed its doors after 143 years in January 1994, no longer able to compete with The Sacramento Bee
, which was founded in 1857, just six years after the Union.
was in its infancy.
Under the direction of its first editor Dr. John F. Morse, who had attracted proprietors through letters to the New Orleans Delta and well-known literary attainments, The Union was initially printed as The Daily Union on Wednesday, March 19, 1851. Upon the front page of this 23-inch by 34-inch paper, Morse addressed the readers of The Union, committing to “publish the first news in the best style and at the lowest prices” and “to have an efficient correspondent in every important town and mining region in the state.”
The existence of the paper had evolved through the efforts of four Sacramento Transcript printers. The printers had introduced the idea of The Union’s creation a year earlier, due to their frustrations with a labor dispute between the Transcript and the Placer Times, which were the city’s first two newspapers. The battle between these two newspapers became so fierce that the papers sold advertising space for below the cost of composition for the mere purpose of undercutting their competition.
Opening its operation at its 21 J St. headquarters, The Union endured very competitive times during its early years, which found it as one of about 60 Sacramento newspapers.
Sacramento’s status as a newspaper town, however, was short lived, as all but two newspapers failed, leading to The Union’s famous slogan, “The Oldest Daily in the West.” In addition to this fact, The Union’s early years are also recognized for their famous contributors, who included Mark Twain
, Bret Harte
and Dan De Quille.
The Union is also noted for covering many world-famous events with details about the Gold Rush
, the American Civil War
, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
and fire, World Wars I
and II
, Charles Lindberg’s flights across the Atlantic, the Vietnam War
, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Iranian hostage crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The emergence of The Daily Union as a leading newspaper evolved quite quickly, as its initial circulation of 500 was soon afterward expanded with an even wider circulation and the daily publication was joined by the semi-monthly Steamer Union (1851) for Atlantic states and European readers, the Weekly Union (1852), and the semi-annual Pictorial Union (1853), which featured drawings of towns, landscapes and other scenes of the era.
The Union, which was often referred to as the “Miners’ Bible” during its early years, passed a major test when it overcame a great fire on Nov. 2, 1852 and continued printing on a small press that was saved from the flames. A brick building, which still stands today, was later constructed at 121 J Street to replace the paper’s original building.
In 1852, Thomas Gardiner, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Times
, was publisher of the Union.
, who is better known by his nom de plume of Mark Twain
, however, who is remembered most for his contributions to The Union. This point was evident through the large bronze bust of Twain, which sat just west of the State Capitol in the lobby of The Union’s latter building at 301 Capitol Mall.
Inscribed on the bust were Twain’s words: “Early in 1866, George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter, I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands
to write four letters a month at twenty dollars a piece. I was there for four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known man on the Pacific Coast
.”
Twain dispatched a series of articles on Hawaii for The Union in 1866. These were very popular, and many historians credit the series with turning Twain into a journalistic star. Because many people thought that Twain wrote in The Union building, whenever The Union was struggling financially during the turn of the 20th century, the owners would drag out an old desk and sell it for a princely sum as "the desk where Mark Twain sat."
Unfortunately, said Charlotte Gilmore, former head of The Union’s “morgue” or bound volumes collection, the original Twain articles were cut out and stolen from The Union’s bound volumes during the 1970s.
“Sometime after I left in the summer of 1971, it happened,” Gilmore said. “It’s a very disappointing situation, but at least the (Twain) articles were photographed (for microfilm) before this happened.”
The Union’s bound volumes, as well as the bronze bust of Twain, are now in the possession of the Shields Library at UC Davis, having been donated by the Danel and Reboin families, owners of the Herald Printing Co. The Twain articles can be viewed on microfilm at the Sacramento Public Library’s central location at 828 I St.
The Sacramento Publishing Co. purchased the Sacramento Daily Union, as it was then known, and the Daily Record in 1875 and merged them into one newspaper, calling it the Sacramento Daily Record-Union – a name that was later dropped.
As a well-respected publication and a fixture of the city, The Union remained financially successful, as it continued providing news decade after decade. But with the passing of the Eighties, which saw the newspaper selling about 105,000 papers daily, The Union’s circulation had declined to about half this figure.
In about two decades, the paper had fallen from the heights of its 1966 purchase by Copley Press
, which brought in millions of dollars that resulted in improvements such as the 1967 construction of the publication’s Capitol Mall headquarters and a new long-run, photo-offset press. During those years it was the dominant morning newspaper in Sacramento. Then, in the mid-1970s, The Bee decided to go head-to-head with The Union as a morning newspaper and promised that the Bee would arrive on the doorstep by 6:00 a.m. The Union circulation department couldn't equal that service, and the Bee quickly became the larger of the two dailies.
While the Bee had a much larger staff, the Union beat the Bee on a number of huge stories. Among them were the Dorothea Puente
Victorian grave sites and the investigative reporting that led to the resignation of California Department of Education
Superintendent Bill Honig.
Conservative financier
Richard Mellon Scaife
owned the newspaper from 1977 to 1989. While there were reports that Scaife lost millions of dollars every year on the newspaper, he enjoyed having a conservative voice in the capital of the largest state in the union.
In the late 1980s, the newspaper changed from the standard broadsheet
size to a tabloid, and the Union launched a marketing campaign called "Grab the Tab." For the most part, it was a failure and the paper suffered losses in circulation.
In 1989, Scaife sold the Union to local real estate developers Daniel Benvenuti Jr. and David Kassis. They hired Joseph Farah
as editor, and the paper veered even further to the right. According to a former reporter, Farah issued memos prohibiting reporters from using the words "gay," assault rifles," and "women's health center"; these were replaced by "homosexual," semi-automatic rifles," and "abortion clinics." Farah resigned as editor 15 months later; under his editorship, the paper's circulation declined nearly 30 percent, from 72,000 to 52,000. Farah later founded the website WorldNetDaily
.
Benvenuti and Kassis sold the newspaper's press—which was state of the art in the mid-1960s, creating the best color of newspapers throughout the nation—in 1991 to a Mexican town. They began to have the paper printed at Herald Printing. Herald's president Ralph Danel Jr. acquired the Union from Benvenuti and Kassis in November 1992. The selling price was in large part the debt that Benvenuti and Kassis owed Herald for its printing services.
In an attempt to reduce losses, circulation was dropped outside of the Sacramento metro area and, two months before its closure, publication was changed from seven days a week to three days a week.
The formerly daily Union published its final edition on Friday, January 14, 1994. The cover featured a color photo of the paper's last staff under the blaring headline, "We're History," coined by the newspaper's last editor, Ken Harvey.
To meet its goals, the new Union set up offices in Fair Oaks
and worked with former Union publishing staff to prepare for its return.
In August 2004, a modernized Sacramento Union returned with bimonthly magazine
s, then started publishing monthly in May 2005. James H. Smith, a former publisher of the Sacramento Union newspaper and co-founder of the Western Journalism Center
with Farah, served as publisher, and Kenneth E. Grubbs Jr., former director of the National Journalism Center
who had also worked for the Orange County Register, served as editor.
The publishers did not intend to return as a print daily newspaper, concentrating instead on web and magazine publishing.
Due to its very limited success, the magazine ceased existing after only five issues. Much of the office staff was laid off in May 2005.http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2005/05/30/story2.html Smith and Grubbs were ousted in June 2005, and J.J. McClatchy, a member of the Union's board of directors, was named general manager. Smith accused McClatchy of staging a hostile takeover of the Union on behalf of his family, which owns The Sacramento Bee
.http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45032
Ryan Rose
, The Union’s current managing editor, served as the magazine's Web editor; he said that many people were confused upon seeing The Union as a magazine.
“We were known in this region for more than 100 years as a newspaper and then less than 10 years after The Union closed as a newspaper, we reissued it as a magazine and I firmly believe that the magazine suffered because we betrayed the brand,” Rose said.
After several months of dormancy, a new print edition of The Sacramento Union appeared on Friday, July 21, 2006, sporting a similar masthead as the magazine and the notation "Since 1851". The volume number in the paper was listed as "Volume 1, Number 1."
fom 2006 to 2009. Published by The Sacramento Union, LLC, the paper also published a daily news Web site. J.C. Dutra was The Unions publisher
and editor-in-chief. The paper was conservative in tone.
The Sacramento Union suspended publication of both the paper and the website in March 2009.
crews razed the old daily Union office building, located at 301 Capitol Mall in downtown Sacramento. The building was constructed in 1967. (Earth Metrics Inc., 1989.) A 53-story high-rise called "The Towers on Capitol Mall
" was planned for the Unions previous spot, but by 2007, the developer was struggling to finance the project and plans were scrapped. The former location is currently fenced off and its future is unknown.
.
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
founded in 1851 in Sacramento, California
Sacramento, California
Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...
. It was the oldest daily newspaper west of the Mississippi River before it closed its doors after 143 years in January 1994, no longer able to compete with The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee is a daily newspaper published in Sacramento, California, in the United States. Since its creation in 1857, the Bee has become Sacramento's largest newspaper, the fifth largest newspaper in California, and the 25th largest paper in the U.S...
, which was founded in 1857, just six years after the Union.
Founding
The birth of this storied newspaper institution began 156 years ago, when the city of SacramentoSacramento, California
Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...
was in its infancy.
Under the direction of its first editor Dr. John F. Morse, who had attracted proprietors through letters to the New Orleans Delta and well-known literary attainments, The Union was initially printed as The Daily Union on Wednesday, March 19, 1851. Upon the front page of this 23-inch by 34-inch paper, Morse addressed the readers of The Union, committing to “publish the first news in the best style and at the lowest prices” and “to have an efficient correspondent in every important town and mining region in the state.”
The existence of the paper had evolved through the efforts of four Sacramento Transcript printers. The printers had introduced the idea of The Union’s creation a year earlier, due to their frustrations with a labor dispute between the Transcript and the Placer Times, which were the city’s first two newspapers. The battle between these two newspapers became so fierce that the papers sold advertising space for below the cost of composition for the mere purpose of undercutting their competition.
Opening its operation at its 21 J St. headquarters, The Union endured very competitive times during its early years, which found it as one of about 60 Sacramento newspapers.
Sacramento’s status as a newspaper town, however, was short lived, as all but two newspapers failed, leading to The Union’s famous slogan, “The Oldest Daily in the West.” In addition to this fact, The Union’s early years are also recognized for their famous contributors, who included Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, Bret Harte
Bret Harte
Francis Bret Harte was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.- Life and career :...
and Dan De Quille.
Gold rush
A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area that has had a dramatic discovery of gold. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the United States, while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere.In the 19th and early...
, the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
1906 San Francisco earthquake
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco, California, and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the earthquake is a moment magnitude of 7.9; however, other...
and fire, World Wars I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Charles Lindberg’s flights across the Atlantic, the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Iranian hostage crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The emergence of The Daily Union as a leading newspaper evolved quite quickly, as its initial circulation of 500 was soon afterward expanded with an even wider circulation and the daily publication was joined by the semi-monthly Steamer Union (1851) for Atlantic states and European readers, the Weekly Union (1852), and the semi-annual Pictorial Union (1853), which featured drawings of towns, landscapes and other scenes of the era.
The Union, which was often referred to as the “Miners’ Bible” during its early years, passed a major test when it overcame a great fire on Nov. 2, 1852 and continued printing on a small press that was saved from the flames. A brick building, which still stands today, was later constructed at 121 J Street to replace the paper’s original building.
In 1852, Thomas Gardiner, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, was publisher of the Union.
Mark Twain and The Sacramento Union
It is the Missouri-born Samuel Langhorne ClemensMark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, who is better known by his nom de plume of Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, however, who is remembered most for his contributions to The Union. This point was evident through the large bronze bust of Twain, which sat just west of the State Capitol in the lobby of The Union’s latter building at 301 Capitol Mall.
Hawaiian Islands
The Hawaiian Islands are an archipelago of eight major islands, several atolls, numerous smaller islets, and undersea seamounts in the North Pacific Ocean, extending some 1,500 miles from the island of Hawaii in the south to northernmost Kure Atoll...
to write four letters a month at twenty dollars a piece. I was there for four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known man on the Pacific Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
.”
Twain dispatched a series of articles on Hawaii for The Union in 1866. These were very popular, and many historians credit the series with turning Twain into a journalistic star. Because many people thought that Twain wrote in The Union building, whenever The Union was struggling financially during the turn of the 20th century, the owners would drag out an old desk and sell it for a princely sum as "the desk where Mark Twain sat."
Unfortunately, said Charlotte Gilmore, former head of The Union’s “morgue” or bound volumes collection, the original Twain articles were cut out and stolen from The Union’s bound volumes during the 1970s.
“Sometime after I left in the summer of 1971, it happened,” Gilmore said. “It’s a very disappointing situation, but at least the (Twain) articles were photographed (for microfilm) before this happened.”
The Union’s bound volumes, as well as the bronze bust of Twain, are now in the possession of the Shields Library at UC Davis, having been donated by the Danel and Reboin families, owners of the Herald Printing Co. The Twain articles can be viewed on microfilm at the Sacramento Public Library’s central location at 828 I St.
Late 1800s
On Nov. 17, 1858, The Union became the first California newspaper to issue a double-sheet daily. The publication was also recognized as the largest double-sheet daily in the nation.The Sacramento Publishing Co. purchased the Sacramento Daily Union, as it was then known, and the Daily Record in 1875 and merged them into one newspaper, calling it the Sacramento Daily Record-Union – a name that was later dropped.
As a well-respected publication and a fixture of the city, The Union remained financially successful, as it continued providing news decade after decade. But with the passing of the Eighties, which saw the newspaper selling about 105,000 papers daily, The Union’s circulation had declined to about half this figure.
In about two decades, the paper had fallen from the heights of its 1966 purchase by Copley Press
Copley Press
Copley Press was a privately held newspaper business, founded in Illinois, but later based in La Jolla, California. Its flagship paper was The San Diego Union-Tribune.-Pulitzer Prizes:...
, which brought in millions of dollars that resulted in improvements such as the 1967 construction of the publication’s Capitol Mall headquarters and a new long-run, photo-offset press. During those years it was the dominant morning newspaper in Sacramento. Then, in the mid-1970s, The Bee decided to go head-to-head with The Union as a morning newspaper and promised that the Bee would arrive on the doorstep by 6:00 a.m. The Union circulation department couldn't equal that service, and the Bee quickly became the larger of the two dailies.
While the Bee had a much larger staff, the Union beat the Bee on a number of huge stories. Among them were the Dorothea Puente
Dorothea Puente
Dorothea Helen Puente was a convicted American serial killer. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and cashed the Social Security checks of her elderly and mentally disabled boarders...
Victorian grave sites and the investigative reporting that led to the resignation of California Department of Education
California Department of Education
The California Department of Education is a California agency that oversees public education. The department oversees funding and testing, and holds local educational agencies accountable for student achievement...
Superintendent Bill Honig.
Conservative financier
Financier
Financier is a term for a person who handles typically large sums of money, usually involving money lending, financing projects, large-scale investing, or large-scale money management. The term is French, and derives from finance or payment...
Richard Mellon Scaife
Richard Mellon Scaife
Richard Mellon Scaife is an American newspaper publisher and billionaire. Scaife owns and publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. With $1.2 billion, Scaife, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, is No...
owned the newspaper from 1977 to 1989. While there were reports that Scaife lost millions of dollars every year on the newspaper, he enjoyed having a conservative voice in the capital of the largest state in the union.
In the late 1980s, the newspaper changed from the standard broadsheet
Broadsheet
Broadsheet is the largest of the various newspaper formats and is characterized by long vertical pages . The term derives from types of popular prints usually just of a single sheet, sold on the streets and containing various types of material, from ballads to political satire. The first broadsheet...
size to a tabloid, and the Union launched a marketing campaign called "Grab the Tab." For the most part, it was a failure and the paper suffered losses in circulation.
In 1989, Scaife sold the Union to local real estate developers Daniel Benvenuti Jr. and David Kassis. They hired Joseph Farah
Joseph Farah
-External links:* Official website* *...
as editor, and the paper veered even further to the right. According to a former reporter, Farah issued memos prohibiting reporters from using the words "gay," assault rifles," and "women's health center"; these were replaced by "homosexual," semi-automatic rifles," and "abortion clinics." Farah resigned as editor 15 months later; under his editorship, the paper's circulation declined nearly 30 percent, from 72,000 to 52,000. Farah later founded the website WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is an American web site that publishes news and associated content from a U.S. conservative perspective. It was founded in May 1997 by Joseph Farah with the stated intent of "exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power" and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.-History:In...
.
Benvenuti and Kassis sold the newspaper's press—which was state of the art in the mid-1960s, creating the best color of newspapers throughout the nation—in 1991 to a Mexican town. They began to have the paper printed at Herald Printing. Herald's president Ralph Danel Jr. acquired the Union from Benvenuti and Kassis in November 1992. The selling price was in large part the debt that Benvenuti and Kassis owed Herald for its printing services.
In an attempt to reduce losses, circulation was dropped outside of the Sacramento metro area and, two months before its closure, publication was changed from seven days a week to three days a week.
The formerly daily Union published its final edition on Friday, January 14, 1994. The cover featured a color photo of the paper's last staff under the blaring headline, "We're History," coined by the newspaper's last editor, Ken Harvey.
2005: Sacramento Union Magazine
The road to the rebirth of The Union in its newspaper form began in early 2004, when the name of the newspaper was acquired for the purpose of restarting the publication.To meet its goals, the new Union set up offices in Fair Oaks
Fair Oaks, California
Fair Oaks is a census-designated place in Sacramento County, California, United States. It is part of the Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 30,912 at the 2010 census, up from 28,008 at the 2000 census. Fair Oaks's zip code is 95628...
and worked with former Union publishing staff to prepare for its return.
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
s, then started publishing monthly in May 2005. James H. Smith, a former publisher of the Sacramento Union newspaper and co-founder of the Western Journalism Center
Western Journalism Center
The Western Journalism Center was founded in 1991 by Joseph Farah and James H. Smith. It is based in Sacramento, California.-Projects:...
with Farah, served as publisher, and Kenneth E. Grubbs Jr., former director of the National Journalism Center
National Journalism Center
The National Journalism Center, established in 1977 by conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, runs programs and internships for journalism students to help them to become professional journalists, and to educate them on topics which relate to conservative political issues and values.-...
who had also worked for the Orange County Register, served as editor.
The publishers did not intend to return as a print daily newspaper, concentrating instead on web and magazine publishing.
Due to its very limited success, the magazine ceased existing after only five issues. Much of the office staff was laid off in May 2005.http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2005/05/30/story2.html Smith and Grubbs were ousted in June 2005, and J.J. McClatchy, a member of the Union's board of directors, was named general manager. Smith accused McClatchy of staging a hostile takeover of the Union on behalf of his family, which owns The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee is a daily newspaper published in Sacramento, California, in the United States. Since its creation in 1857, the Bee has become Sacramento's largest newspaper, the fifth largest newspaper in California, and the 25th largest paper in the U.S...
.http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45032
Ryan Rose
Ryan Rose
Ryan Rose is a journalist living in Sacramento, California. Ryan Joseph Rose is best known for having documented Vacaville resident Cindy Sheehan's 2005 protest of President Bush outside of his Crawford, Texas ranch, also known as the Western White House.From Rose's 2005 investigation into the...
, The Union’s current managing editor, served as the magazine's Web editor; he said that many people were confused upon seeing The Union as a magazine.
“We were known in this region for more than 100 years as a newspaper and then less than 10 years after The Union closed as a newspaper, we reissued it as a magazine and I firmly believe that the magazine suffered because we betrayed the brand,” Rose said.
After several months of dormancy, a new print edition of The Sacramento Union appeared on Friday, July 21, 2006, sporting a similar masthead as the magazine and the notation "Since 1851". The volume number in the paper was listed as "Volume 1, Number 1."
2006-2009: Tabloid
In 2006, The Sacramento Union was reborn as a tabloid-sized free weekly newspaperWeekly newspaper
A weekly newspaper is a general-news publication that is published on newsprint once or twice a week.Such newspapers tend to have smaller circulations than daily newspapers, and are usually based in less-populous communities or small, defined areas within large cities; often, they may cover a...
fom 2006 to 2009. Published by The Sacramento Union, LLC, the paper also published a daily news Web site. J.C. Dutra was The Unions publisher
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...
and editor-in-chief. The paper was conservative in tone.
The Sacramento Union suspended publication of both the paper and the website in March 2009.
Newspaper building
In the autumn of 2005, demolitionDemolition
Demolition is the tearing-down of buildings and other structures, the opposite of construction. Demolition contrasts with deconstruction, which involves taking a building apart while carefully preserving valuable elements for re-use....
crews razed the old daily Union office building, located at 301 Capitol Mall in downtown Sacramento. The building was constructed in 1967. (Earth Metrics Inc., 1989.) A 53-story high-rise called "The Towers on Capitol Mall
Towers on Capitol Mall
The Towers on Capitol Mall were two 53-story, 615 foot mixed-use towers to be built in downtown Sacramento, California. The buildings were planned to have 804 condominiums, a 200 room InterContinental Hotel, and ground floor retail. Rumoured retailers include Gucci, Prada, Kenneth Cole and...
" was planned for the Unions previous spot, but by 2007, the developer was struggling to finance the project and plans were scrapped. The former location is currently fenced off and its future is unknown.
Archives
The archives of the daily Union are in the Special Collections of the Shields Library of UC DavisUniversity of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...
.