202 York Street

It’s time to celebrate!

The renovation is finished, and the building looks great. Please join us on October 15 and 16 for our rededication weekend. Learn more here: yaledailynews.com/celebrate

Restoration Lighting

Our friends at Grand Light have finished their phenomenal work on four original light fixtures in the building. You can read more here.

And here’s the beautiful fixture in the Boardroom, waiting to be installed again:

Cleaning the building for the first time in a long time!

Progress!

Up in the Boardroom, intricate woodwork repairs are being made and stains are being selected for the hardwood floor.

Down in the Basement, infrastructural work is still underway:

Studio ABK Architects has been very helpful in organizing the Board portraits by size so they can be easily installed at the end of the project:

Just a few more weeks to go!

What are we doing?

You can read more about the renovation above, on the “About the Project” page, but here’s a quick summary since many of our visitors are new to the site. The Briton Hadden Memorial Building was constructed in 1932 and renovated only once, in the 1980s, when a darkroom was added to the basement. This summer, the News, working with Studio ABK Architects and Shawmut Design & Construction, is renovating the facility.

There are four major goals of the renovation:

1. To reclaim the basement level and top level, which were essentially unused prior to the renovation;
2. To create a more collaborative, exciting work environment;
3. To establish a multimedia studio space in the heart of the building;
4. To improve the systems and condition of as much of the building as is financially feasible.

Here was the layout of the building through May 2010:

And here is the layout that we will return to in August:

As you can see, the basement is being completely gutted. An expanded — and accessible — bathroom is being built on the first floor. A large, open newsroom and multimedia studio are being built on the second floor. And our Arts & Living section will take over the top level space that was basically abandoned in the past.

This work is going to be finished in August. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime project, and we thank you for your interest in the renovation.

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It’s roof repair time! After years of leaks and other problems, the roof is finally being fixed.

For years, plaster from the wall above the iconic portrait of Briton Hadden in our boardroom has been falling onto the painting. Patricia Sherwin Garland, an expert in art restoration who works at the Yale University Art Gallery, is restoring the painting this summer. The Gallery is also providing us with a piece of the anti-reflective glass they use in front of paintings.

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Lighting upgrades are critical to the renovation. Throughout the building, we are improving the lighting and replacing some truly awful fixtures. But we’re restoring four of the fixtures — one in the Boardroom, two in the stairwell, and the original exterior light

You can read more about the work here:

http://lightrestoration.com/blog/2010/06/172grand-light-begins-restoration.html

The new bathroom on the first floor will be more than double the size of the old one and it will be fully accessible to people in wheelchairs. To accomplish this, we had to demolish the old vault and a closet.

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Our new newsroom comes to life! Look at all that space and light.