The ghosts are everywhere in a building that has been our home for the past 54 years.
So many people, so much laughter, too many tears, so many stories, so many editions.
Theatre Northwest artistic director Jack Grinhaus said visiting the The Citizen's office felt like walking onto the set of All The President's Men, the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman movie about the Washington Post's Watergate stories that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Yes, we've been working inside a time warp for the past four decades.
And now we're leaving for a different, modern space, where we'll write new stories, fight new battles and continue to cover the Prince George community in the same way we've been doing for the past 101 years.
More than half of that time has been from our location at 150 Brunswick St., off First Avenue. The Citizen's owner of the day, Bunny Milner and his wife Charity, spared no expense in the construction of the building. It was designed by architect Trelle Morrow and built by Dezell Construction with wood from the Milner sawmills. Its roof was supported by massive wooden beams, the precursor of the engineered laminate now used half a century later for buildings like the Wood Innovation and Design Centre in downtown Prince George.
The building housed a state-of-the-art Goss Urbanite press and one of the earliest editions it printed in 1963 came out on Friday, Nov. 22.
The headline PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD in red was one of the first times Citizen readers ever saw colour in their newspaper. The next day, the Milners hosted an open house to show residents their new building and press. Safe to say, the hundreds of people who came down to 150 Brunswick St. spent most of the time talking about the tragedy in Dallas the day before.
The entire paper was assembled through a labour-intensive manual effort, and has undergone constant technological change ever since. The press would eventually move across the street to 145 Brunswick St. where it operates to this day, rebuilt multiple times with colour units added on to it.
An addition to 150 Brunswick St. was built in the 1970s. Telex machines were replaced by fax machines and then by email. Satellite dishes on the top of the building were replaced by fibre optic cables running into computer servers, linking the entire staff to both an internal network and the internet. Desktop computers replaced typewriters, the huge drafting tables where the newspaper was pasted up by hand, the physical clipping archive maintained by a newsroom librarian and even the photographer's darkroom.
The building, like any home, was simply the house for the people, the usually safe space for employees to work. Like any workplace, passions and personalities sometimes collided.
The walls of The Citizen have witnessed death threats, fist fights, screaming matches, chairs flipped, walls and filing cabinets kicked, along with multiple invitations between employees of both sexes to settle disagreements outside in the parking lot.
We've wept together over the years, when we've lost colleagues to cancer, illness, suicide and traffic accidents or simply to relocation or retirement.
It won't be easy leaving this place, not just from an emotional and historical attachment but also from a practical standpoint.
There has been so much stuff saved over the decades, stashed in boxes in corners, much of it largely forgotten. Most of it is garbage, much like the items that are often unearthed in those community time capsules, important in the moment it was saved by the person who set it aside but completely irrelevant and worthless today.
Some of it, however, is of great value, such as the film negatives, Morrow's building drawings and other materials that The Citizen has turned over to The Exploration Place for proper archiving.
Some of it is of more personal value - photographs, notes, keepsakes and gifts that link past and present employees to this place, to each other, to our shared experiences.
We'll keep as much of it as we can to display at our new office, for current staff to celebrate our history and to show new hires that they're now part of a long and proud tradition.
In the meantime, for Citizen customers coming down to 150 Brunswick St. over the next month or so until we complete our move, we apologize for the mess and the chaos as we pack up our things and gradually settle into our new location in the second floor of the IWA building at Third Avenue and Winnipeg Street.
Chances are you'll also see us, individually or gathering in small groups, standing and looking around, seeing our ghosts, saying goodbye to our home away from our homes and looking forward to a new life and new memories in a new place, together.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
