NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Amid champagne corks and moving boxes, New York Times staffers selected all the news that was fit to print for a final time at their century-old headquarters on Saturday.
The newspaper's Manhattan employees were busy packing up their storied stone building on West 43rd Street and moving the newsroom into a shining new tower just a walk to the south.
It's also a leap into the 21st century, a 52-story, ceramic-and-glass skyscraper filling a block of Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st streets, packed with the latest technology.
The paper's final page-one meeting in the old building started at exactly 12:30 p.m., a ritual gathering of editors selecting the best of ``All The News That's Fit To Print,'' the motto once coined by a Times publisher, the late Adolph S. Ochs.
A champagne cork popped over the table, with plastic cups at the ready as weekend editor Marty Gottlieb announced ``the last issue of the New York Times in this venerable building.''
With early, or ``bulldog,'' editions of Sunday's paper already out, Gottlieb and about a dozen editors reviewed the top news and any changes for later editions. They spoke of the Belmont Stakes, a gap in a thermal blanket on the space shuttle and Pope Benedict's visit with President Bush. There was talk of federal authorities notifying former Newark Mayor Sharpe James that he is the target of a grand jury probe on corruption charges, and of a fire in a Queens supermarket that trapped five workers who were locked inside.
A Times camera was there to capture the champagne cork that had flown to the floor.
Elsewhere on the third-floor newsroom, strewn with bright orange moving crates around abandoned desks, freshly baked pizzas were ordered in for these last hours.
By midnight, the last paper edited in the old Times building would be out. And by Sunday morning, the weekend staff would be at the new building working on Monday's paper.
The new headquarters, opposite the city's Port Authority Bus Terminal, are still walking distance from the paper's namesake: Times Square. An earlier home of the newspaper, now known as One Times Square, is the building from which the New Year's ball descends each year.
The Times moved from that spot to the French Gothic style edifice on West 43rd Street in 1913.
The new building, a joint venture between The New York Times Co. and Forest City Ratner Cos., was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano in collaboration with the Manhattan-based architectural firm of Fox & Fowle.
The design, which Piano likened to ``a magic lantern,'' incorporates a transparent-looking tower screened by planes of glazed ceramic tubes that absorb sunlight and transform it into energy.
The Times' latest headquarters offers ``Less Stuffiness, Better Ventilation,'' read a poster tacked to the wall near the elevators of the old building. Nearby were more posters touting other virtues of the Times' new digs, including ``More Dining Options'' and ``Fresh Water ... Everywhere,'' referring to the building's centralized filtration system.
By Saturday afternoon, the water fountains in the old headquarters were turned off. But there was champagne.
Weekend national editor Jerry Gray proposed a toast to the remaining staff in the Times' old newsroom: ``Here's to the bulldog! Here's to the best of the past!''
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