AP to Leave Rockefeller Center

The Associated Press will move its headquarters from Rockefeller Center to larger offices on the West Side of Manhattan next year.
The organization said it will consolidate four New York news and management operations under one roof. It will occupy the top three floors of a 16-story building at 450 W. 33rd St., west of Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, under a 15-year lease. That building also houses news and business offices of the New York Daily News, New York offices of U.S. News and World Report and public TV station WNET.
“AP’s current lease, in the building at 50 Rockefeller Plaza that has borne its name for 65 years, expires in September 2004,” it stated.
As attractions of the new facility, it cited “bigger, more open floors and high ceilings” for AP’s television, radio, text, image and multimedia services. AP also said it would have incurred a “substantial” rent increase at Rockefeller Center if it had stayed. It moved to the Rockefeller Center site in 1938.
More history from the AP statement:
“It will be AP’s sixth New York City headquarters. The cooperative first opened its doors in 1848 at 150 Broadway, near where the World Trade Center would rise more than a century later. Only one of those earlier buildings survives today, an ornate 19th-century structure on Chambers Street facing the back of City Hall. AP had its headquarters there from 1913 to 1924.”