Times Insider shares historic insights from The New York Times. In this piece, David W. Dunlap, a Metro reporter, looks back at a mural that has been given new life.
“Every Day Is a Fresh Beginning — Every Morn Is the World Made New.”
For more than 40 years, those words greeted everyone who worked at or visited The New York Times’s headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street. Suspended in the darkness of space, they orbited a 21-foot-long orthographic projection of Earth.
It was painted by the muralist Eugene Kingman (1909-1975), who directed the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha in collaboration with one of America’s pre-eminent cartographers, Richard Edes Harrison (1901-1994).
On Thursday, the mural is to be unveiled a second time, back home in Omaha, as an artistic centerpiece of the W. Dale Clark Library downtown, part of the Omaha Public Library system. The library director, Laura Marlane, said in a statement that the artwork well represented the institution’s mission: “Opening your world to new opportunities and experiences.”
Fittingly enough, the poem by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835-1905) from which the inscription was taken is titled, “Begin Again.”
The optimistic, globe-girdling motto can be understood literally. But in 1948, when the mural was installed in The Times’s main lobby, viewers would have instantly grasped its larger meaning: that a devastated world was beginning to recover from the trauma of World War II.
The map’s viewpoint, centered on the North Atlantic Ocean at 40 degrees west, 25 degrees north, also spoke volumes about the confidence — would hubris be a better word? — with which the United States and Western Europe had assumed the mantle of world leadership after defeating the Axis powers.
“One-fifth of the total land and water area of the world is shown in this view,” the mural caption read, “and it is safe to say that it is the most important fifth.”
By the late ’80s, the notion that the world’s future turned solely on the North Atlantic had been discredited by the rise of Asian powers. The mural’s artistry — stunningly realistic for a generation that had never seen Earth from space — was looking out of date. The words, from a 19th-century poem, rang hollow in a Times Square where every day brought a fresh mugging and every morn a drugged hangover.
The canvas itself was showing signs of strain and age. So it was rolled up and tucked away. Its place was taken by easy-to-maintain, unembarrassing marble panels.
We brought the rolled-up mural with us when we moved two blocks south in 2007, to 620 Eighth Avenue. But no one knew what to do with a 147-square-foot artwork that needed tens of thousands of dollars of restorative work; dollars that The Times no longer had.
Fortunately, we weren’t the only ones who knew about the mural.
“Kingman was a wunderkind who had commissions from the National Park Service while he was still an undergraduate at Yale, and eight of those paintings won international awards at an exposition in Paris,” said Maureen McCann Waldron, the chairwoman of the Kingman/New York Times Mural Committee in Omaha and a retired administrator at Creighton University.
Working with Mr. Kingman’s daughters, Elizabeth Kingman and Mixie Kingman Eddy, Ms. Waldron and others persuaded The Times in 2014 to part with the mural, for which it had originally paid $3,600. It was understood that the artwork would be restored and placed on public display. Ownership was transferred to the nonprofit Joslyn Castle Trust.
“After about a year of fund-raising, we had more than 100 donors who put almost $65,000 in the fund to restore and hang the mural,” Ms. Waldron said. Two donors, she said, were Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman of The New York Times Company, and Michael Golden, the vice chairman. (She didn’t reveal how much The Times executives gave.)
“I’m thrilled that this stunning artwork that greeted employees and visitors to The New York Times for four decades has found such a fitting home,” Tom Bodkin, The Times’s creative director, said on Wednesday. “Its universal, life-affirming message will again be accessible and inspirational to a large audience.”
Though the map does not depict political boundaries — part of what makes it timeless — it does show major cities. They appear as red splotches on the topography. Much to the delight of the mural’s recipients, when they unrolled the artwork two years ago they found a dot just where Omaha should be.