A visit to the dead letter office on the third floor

by Jack Neely

I share this mainly with people who don't carry bricks around with them, but Metro Pulse is located on the third floor of the Arnstein, the old department-store building at Market and Union. For more than a decade, this building was best known as the headquarters of 13-30 and Whittle Communications. In the late '70s and early '80s, Esquire magazine was owned and controlled by people whose offices were in this building. Ten years ago this month, they offered me a job as an editorial assistant for a humor publication. I reported for work right here on the third floor. They didn't know what to do with me at first; put me in a corner with a cup of tea and a pile of joke books, suggested I give them a read.

If anyone were to compare my old business cards, one for Whittle Communications, one for Metro Pulse, both printed 505 Market Street, they'd probably conclude I was a lot like Bartleby the Scrivener, the Melville character who couldn't be fired, who kept working in the same building even after his original firm left it. Maybe I am.

Anyway, in 1987, shortly after I started, Whittle moved all its editorial offices over to the Andrew Johnson Building, several blocks away. Whittle evacuated the Arnstein thoroughly when the company moved into the big new building in the summer of '91. Three years later, of course, the company went out of business. It all seems like a very long time ago.

Whittle Communications hasn't occupied this building in well over six years, but we still walk on the purple carpet they laid down here sometime in the early '80s. In the stairwells, the pipes and ductwork are still painted in trendy high-contrast urban-chic red. I've been told there are still forgotten Whittle financial records in the basement.

One of the least likely remnants is taped at the bottom of the marble-paneled stairwell. (Impatient with the elevator, I usually took the stairs 10 years ago, and still do now.) It's a sign, the last part of a Burma-Shave-style series, a computer graphic of a sleeved hand pointing to the phrase, On the AJ First Floor!

In the late '80s, soon after Whittle's editorial offices moved into six floors of the Andrew Johnson Building, the new Whittle library on the mezzanine offered a general amnesty for late books; bring them in, they said, and there's no fine. The AJ has been mostly occupied by the Knox County School system for years, but there's the fancy sign in the Arnstein, still advertising Whittle Library Amnesty Day, circa 1989. (Whittle art directors spent hours on intra-office greetings, encouraged by their supervisors who assumed it helped company morale. They just forgot to take this one down.)

Those Whittlefolk are like ghosts. Every week, nearly every day, we still get mail for them. Most of it's junk mail, press-release stuff, sometimes a review copy of a book or record; sometimes a thick letter, a lonely freelancer's submission to a magazine that's been dead for seven or eight years. The saddest things are the envelopes carefully addressed in a little girl's hand to GO!, the magazine for Girls Only. It went out of business around 1990, but it still gets submissions from hopeful contributors.

Here's something to Bill Beuttler. He was a jazz fan from Chicago who lived here for only about six months in 1988 before he got a more lucrative job with one of the better airline magazines. We corresponded for a few months after he left, as he did an interview with his idol, Studs Terkel. We were good friends, but I've lost track of him. Sometimes his byline jumps out at me—in Sports Illustrated a while back, and sometime last year he had a short article about Stan Getz in the New York Times—but I have no idea where he is. And here's some mail from someone who thinks he's right here. Looks like a press release. I'll give it to him next time I see him.

Here's something for Jim McKairnes, the wisecracking kid from Temple U. in Pennsylvania who loved standup comics. When I started working here in '87, he was on the phone doing a long interview with a comedian I'd never heard of, a new guy named Jerry Seinfeld, for Whittle's laundromat comedy poster-magazine. Jim left in '89—I remember the big sendoff we gave him in the cafe downstairs—then found work in Los Angeles writing jokes for stand-up comedians, and is now a big-shot scheduling executive at CBS. The folks who sent this letter to him here thinking maybe he still keeps an office in the Arnstein apparently haven't been following his career.

Here's something for my old boss, Elise Nakhnikian, who left Knoxville seven years ago, has since gotten married, and lives in New Jersey. She was always the most literary of us, and it's not surprising this is from a publishing company in New York. Probably a letter of acceptance for her novel manuscript. Oh well.

All those people left so long ago they never got to see the Big New Whittle Building, but nearly every week they still get mail at their old offices in the Arnstein.

Here's something addressed to a 13-30 honcho who left the company and the state back in '86. It's a survivalist catalogue, Survival Selections. (Come to think of it, I haven't seen him recently.)

Some are addressed to Whittle's previous incarnation, 13-30: Destinations, a magazine they made so long ago I don't even remember it. Here's something for Wallpaper Journal, which shut down in 1984, when they launched Campus Voice. Something for Sourcebook, another '70s-'80s project. Something for Familia De Hoy, the short-lived Spanish-language magazine.

It's right eerie, working here in the old Arnstein and seeing mail for old friends—sort of like feeling an itch in a lost arm.