The vintage Toledo scale that used to weigh massive rolls of newsprint remains in place now guests use it while visiting The Press Room’s high-end gym. Down in the basement, where the printing presses once churned away, there is now an art gallery and a number of meeting rooms. Recently, Brandon Hussey, the director of sales and marketing at the hotel, gave me a tour. “If you had young children and for whatever reason they came to see you at work, or you brought them to work,” Nemitz says, “it was sacrilege not to take them through the tunnel.” There was also a rail tunnel that connected the sub-basement of the building to another building across Congress Street, allowing pages and other materials to be shuttled back and forth during production. Long before Union, the hotel’s restaurant, was serving new American cuisine, there was a subsidized company cafeteria. Still, veteran Press-Herald journalists notice what’s gone. “I have to say that I completely changed my mind after I saw it.” “Part of me was very sad when I heard what they were going to do,” Meredith Goad, who covers food for the paper, says of the hotel team. The cost of a drink-never mind a meal (roast chicken is $26) or a room (a suite goes for $744 a night)-may be a bit steep at $13 per, but Press-Herald staff say they are happy when they walk into the lobby. Conference rooms have names like the “Composing Room.” Oversized woodblock type decorates the wall behind the front desk. It opened in 2015, as part of Marriott’s “Autograph Collection.” The design concept is homegrown: There are old typewriters sitting out on tables, with stacks of paper available for guests to dash off letters. Nemitz says, “I was in total awe of what they had done.”įrom the archives: Iowa newspaper uses escape room to solve the profit puzzleĪfter the Press-Herald moved out of the Gannett Building, and into offices a 15-minute drive away, in South Portland, Jim Brady, a developer born in Maine, spent $14 million (partly defrayed by tax breaks) to remake the Press-Herald offices into The Press Hotel. The view seemed the same, yet inside the room, there was now a bed and a gleaming walk-in shower. The hair on his neck stood up as he took in the familiar sight of city hall across the street. Sitting down at a new desk in what was once his office, Nemitz found that it was in the exact same spot as his used to be. The Gannett Building, which housed The Portland Press-Herald for nearly nine decades and is now home to The Press Hotel. ![]() But he never spent a night there until 2015-five years after the Press-Herald had moved out and the building became a hotel. Over the years, Nemitz spent plenty of long hours in that office. From his window, he could see the mayor and the city council at work. “The building is situated right across from City Hall, which is a great location for a paper,” Nemitz says. It’s the office that Bill Nemitz, a veteran Press-Herald columnist, started visiting in 1977, when he was first hired at The Morning Sentinel, a sister paper in Waterville, Maine, and where he worked for nearly 36 years. Built in 1923, of pale brick and grey stone, the Gannett Building, as it was called, housed the paper and its printing presses for 87 years. Until 2010, the local newspaper, The Portland Press-Herald, had its offices there. The superior and district court buildings, the police and fire stations, and Portland City Hall sit on cobblestone streets. The center of civic life in Portland, Maine, is the Old Port neighborhood, in the city’s downtown.
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