This is a wonderful article, by Kathy Ryan and Maureen Dowd. I didn't know the Quasi's were shut down and working from home.

A Newsroom, On Pause

From the shadows, the office beckons, ready to come alive again.

I first met Kathy Ryan a few years ago... We met on an autumn afternoon in the New York office that’s been headquarters since 2007.

To be honest, I wasn’t that fond of our new building. It was too sunny, too many windows. It took the metaphor of transparency too literally.

COULD not agree more. 

...I prefer shadows, not least for getting work done.

I prefer no windows.

...Kathy... told me I was wrong. She coolly guided me past windows that threw slatted shadows Jacques Tourneur would have envied.

As the evening wore on, I began falling in love with the building and gave it my highest film-noir accolade, “Quite a hacienda.”

She explained that we were blessed with dramatic light because of the Renzo Piano horizontal white ceramic rods that sheath the building for environmental reasons. The shadows striping the rooms lend the place a film noir air.

“Cinematographers spend hours trying to make this light that is handed to us in The New York Times building,” she said.

During the pandemic, Kathy missed the building, or 620, as it’s known because it’s at 620 Eighth Avenue, and headed up there on weekends to make pictures of this historic moment.

Our old building off Times Square was close to empty for 114 days during the printers’ strike of 1962-63, our in-house historian David W. Dunlap recalled, and for 88 days during the pressmen’s strike of 1978. But never before, through wars and 9/11 and hurricanes and even King Kong, had our offices been abandoned for this long a stretch.

Jeffrey Henson Scales, our swell photo editor in Opinion, asked Ryan to document the desolate offices, with baby pictures and sunglasses and towers of books left on desks as though they had been forsaken mid-thought, like the mud statues of Pompeii, or Elsa’s frozen kingdom.

"Swell"? Now you're writing like a film noir screenwriter. Lose swell.

Okay, there's a baby and there's sunglasses. I'm not smitten with the photos cexcept for one. Too much light!

There is something profoundly sad about a newsroom without noise or people. Even without crusty editors in fedoras and green eyeshades yelling, “COPY!” or the clicketyclack of typewriters or the roar of the presses in the basement, the modern Times still throbbed with life, creativity and great stories unspooling on every floor.

Yes, I bet. I returned to the courthouse months after we went on lockdown last year. We were still on lockdown. The courts were closed. After I took care of my business I wandered the hallways, normally crowded beyond fire capacity, now, of course, empty. The judges post their morning "calendars", they're called, the list of the day's cases clipped to an easel built into the wall outside the courtroom. I walked over to one calendar. It was dated March 16, 2020. I had had a jury trial to verdict the previous week that ended on Thursday the 12th. It had to be one of the last jury trial held in that building--to this day!

Kathy’s haunting photos of the Gray Lady speak to the larger picture: deserted offices, all over the world, drained of vitality, preserved in amber, with mail piling up and computer terminals gone dark and plants dying and newspapers left on racks with old headlines like this one from the week we vacated the office in March 2020: “Markets Spiral as Globe Shudders Over Virus.” (We may yet have to use that one again.)

Well, "haunting." Personally, I've never seen a haunted house in blinding sunlight. "Haunting," I think of Chernobyl and Pripyat,

...

We’re tired of Zoom and miss the novelistic dramas of the office but dread resuming some work rituals that now seem de trop.

I'm not tired of Zoom court! And I don't know what de trop means.

I love newsrooms. They are some of the most stimulating rooms in the world. It’s why I became a journalist, to be part of that vertiginous chaos, to scramble chasing stories on deadline with a bunch of hard-boiled hacks.

Yes, I bet they are. Who you calling a hard-boiled hack?!

I haven’t been getting that same frisson hunched at my dining room table.

But other people feel otherwise, and different professions require different things...

Meanwhile, thanks to the insidious Delta variant, The Times has not set an official date for a return. I will have to wait still longer to be reunited with the part of me that I left at the office.

My favorite image is the pile of clocks, stopped at different times when the clocks were taken off the walls. It is an image of time’s defeat, of nature’s power over society, of the disorienting interregnum in our lives...

I do like that image. The stopped timepiece has always held significance. Is that when the person was murdered? Did the Johnstown Flood hit an hour later (or sooner, I forget) because the street clock somewhere stopped at that time. I have always thought stopped timepieces were made by us to tell things they weren't, but as Dowd says, "Other people feel otherwise."

Also, the photograph reminds me of a noir favorite, “The Big Clock.” Charles Laughton is a wicked media tycoon, Ray Milland a crusading journalist. They work in a Manhattan skyscraper, where the clocks mysteriously stop one night during a murder manhunt. I have the movie poster at home. Where I’m working. Indefinitely.

See? I don't know "The Big Clock", I don't know what the significance to a murder manhunt clocks stopping has. Cannot imagine, actually. Dowds clocks in "620" stopped at different times do not tell us that's when "they were taken off the walls" (?) What is she talking about? They stopped at different times because their batteries had different lives left. Anyway, it's Maureen Dowd's fantasy and we can't be critical of others' fantasies. It's a wonderful story.