The handful of reporters who made up The Irish Times in 1882 had barely occupied their new premises when they were plunged into one of the great news scandals of the day - the Invincibles set upon and stabbed to death Lord Frederick Cavendish in the Phoenix Park.
This weekend, 124 years on, the bulk of a staff now numbering 500, will be moving 300 metres from those same but expanded premises to the new Irish Times Building in Tara Street.
Over the weekend of March 18th and 19th, 1882, the paper had taken possession of a former upholsterer's shop at No 31 Westmoreland Street. Over the years it would eventually occupy about half of the triangle framed by Westmoreland Street, Fleet Street and D'Olier Street. It is a ramshackle, chaotic building with a maze of dark corridors and recesses which, until June 2002, echoed at night to the deep rumble of presses and the roar of departing dispatch vans.
Since then the printing has been consigned to Citywest and now the editorial and commercial departments abandon the many colourful ghosts and rich history of what has become known as the Old Lady of D'Olier Street.
The Irish Times was launched on March 9th, 1859, by Captain (later Major) Laurence Knox. He took over vacant premises at
No 4 Lower Abbey Street, almost beside the present day Veritas bookshop, to launch the paper as a conservative thrice-weekly publication; it was a revival of The Irish Times that had been published between 1823 and 1825.
Early success meant that within 14 weeks the paper went daily, but, curiously, another newspaper launched by Knox at the same time, the Saturday Herald, was short-lived.
The new Irish Times was a modest enough affair and all the production work was done at the premises. Typesetting was a manual task and the printing press could produce 5,000 sheets an hour, printed on one side only. In those days, pages were uncut, so better-off readers got their butler to cut the newspaper for breakfast-time reading.
Major Knox died aged 37 in 1873 and The Irish Times was bought for £35,000 by Sir John Arnott, the founder of Arnotts department store, a Scot who had come initially to Cork to make his fortune. The paper was then making a handsome profit of £7,000 a year.
Arnott quickly expanded the paper. He launched the Weekly Irish Times, published at the end of the week as a compendium of the week's news and with lots of features, the equivalent then of the current Saturday magazine. In those days, all the daily papers published this type of weekly edition.
Depots were opened, in Rathmines and at the old Parsons bookshop at Baggot Street bridge. The paper also took over the adjacent premises in Lower Abbey Street, at No 3.
But even this wasn't enough, and so in 1882 The Irish Times moved into Westmoreland Street, while retaining the Lower Abbey Street premises for more than 30 years. In 1895, the paper acquired No 11 D'Olier Street, and so for the first time, the building occupied by the paper ran right through the block. No 31 Westmoreland Street was the front, public office, an extraordinarily magnificent place, designed to impress customers as they placed their small ads.
The counters were gleaming mahogany and JJ Simington, the paper's general manager, took exceptional care to preserve them. Heaven help a front office staffer who wrote something on the counters without protecting it with layers of paper.
Simington was a remarkable man who had joined the paper in 1878 as a 16-year-old and went on to work in the company for a further 65 years.
Staff longevity was common; a man called Stoddart was the financial editor years ago and remained in the job until he was 92, when he dropped dead at work. He simply couldn't afford to retire.
Simington himself was succeeded as general manager by GJC Tynan O'Mahony, usually known as "Pussy" because allegedly he once drank the milk left out for the works cat. He was the father of comedian Dave Allen and another Irish Times journalist of note, Peter.
Behind the front office, a grandiose staircase swept up into the offices proper of the newspaper, including the rather rudimentary editorial offices.
As The Irish Times expanded its occupation of the site, so too did the tangle of corridors and warren of offices grow ever more complicated.
In 1907, when John Healy was appointed editor, the paper, for the first time, had someone who had less than a shadowy existence in charge of editorial.
In 1916, The Irish Times was luckily out of the direct line of fire from the events in Sackville Street, now O'Connell Street. If it had stayed in Lower Abbey Street, it could have been put out of business. In addition to extensive reporting coverage of the Rising and deeply hostile editorials, the paper also published the Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook a year later, still a remarkably vivid source for historians.
Technologically the paper also moved on. It was the first in Ireland to install banks of Linotype machines, which mechanised the business of typesetting. But The Irish Times was still hand-setting some of its type until well into the second World War, the Emergency.
The 1930s saw an extraordinary collection of editorial talent assembled in Westmoreland Street.
Robert Maire Smyllie, usually known simply as Bertie, had been appointed editor; as assistant editor, one of his innovations had been An Irishman's Diary, begun in 1927.
A very big man, yet surprisingly agile, when he came in to work he showed a remarkable turn of speed dodging through the hangers-on and supplicants who lay in wait for his mid-afternoon arrival in the front office.
Upstairs in the newsroom, reporters and editorial writers included Lionel Fleming, later a distinguished BBC correspondent, the Hon Patrick Campbell (later Lord Glenavy), who was said to have developed his stutter especially for his humorous appearances on BBC television, and Edward MacSweeney, later known as Maxwell Sweeney at RTÉ.
When Smyllie had filed his copy for the evening, out came his favourite bottle of brandy, while his deputy, Alec Newman, later himself editor, whipped out his bottle of Power's. These days, newspaper newsrooms are remarkably sober places, but then, a permanent aroma of intoxication pervaded the place. So too did the stench of stale cigarette smoke.
Much of the business of the paper was done in adjoining pubs. Smyllie held court in the Palace Bar, still extant just across the other side of Westmoreland Street. Also popular was the now vanished Pearl Bar - the site is now included in the Westin Hotel. And The Irish Times even had its own social club in Middle Abbey Street and later in two dingy rooms on the fourth floor opposite the Fleet Street works entrance. Strictly for after-hours drinking.
An extraordinary air of anarchic and bohemian eccentricity prevailed. Smyllie used to sing decidedly blue lyrics while working. (In the 70s and 80s the newsroom would echo to Eugene McEldowney's republican ballads.) And Smyllie could read proofs using one hand while playing dominoes with the other.
He was a stickler for grammar and style. "The only commencement in this life is at Trinity College," he was wont to thunder. The stylebook was enormous, Latin dictionaries abounded and war was waged on the split infinitive.
The paper also diversified for the first time, running a servants' registry office called Mrs Synnott's, billed as being "under the charge of Matron", where people could hire domestic staff.
The "characters" were by no means the preserve of editorial. Bill ("Windy") Coyne, a porter in the front office, was batman during the first World War to the then managing director, Sir Lauriston Arnott. He kept a union flag in the basement - in those days, The Irish Times was still a diehard unionist newspaper.
On one occasion, a young staffer of nationalist leanings made a derogatory remark to Coyne, who retorted: "You are disgracing my king's flag. Step outside for a bout of fisticuffs."
A number of old codgers with vague association with the paper actually lived on the premises unofficially, without anyone apparently noticing. One of the best known, "Twitchy" Doyle, an elderly journalist with a perpetually dripping nose, had given the manuscript of his life's work, an ending to Dickens's unfinished Edwin Drood novel, to Smyllie, who had promptly lost it.
Wilfred Brambell, an assistant to the editor of the Irish Field, then part of the company, would later wiacting fame in the BBC series Steptoe and Son.
Somehow, the paper kept going during the Emergency, much reduced in size and heavily censored. For VE day in May 1945, Smyllie thwarted the censors with a front page decorated with a series of photographs forming a "V for Victory". He had railed constantly against wartime censorship.
But change in the paper was slow coming. The first woman reporter to cover news was Barbara Dickson, appointed in 1939 but it would be another 30 years before there was a serious influx of female talent.
Gerry Mulvey, 86 last month, joined the paper in 1947 and became news editor, then deputy editor. Together with Cathal O'Shannon, he is one of the few survivors from that era. Many brilliant people from that post- war period, such as Brian Inglis and Bruce Williamson, are long passed on.
Cathal O'Shannon, who joined the paper in 1948, when it ran to a maximum of eight pages, remembers that the only entrance then was through the grand front office in Westmoreland Street. The Fleet Street works entrance and the D'Olier Street "Front Office" didn't come until much later.
In the reporters' room, a central desk was flanked by several phones on the wall, while it was part of the job spec of junior reporters to keep the coal fires going. A hydraulic system was used to take copy from the subs' room down to the linotypes in the case room for setting.
The Irish Times printed weekly results of chess matches and on one occasion, the results of a competition that had been held 10 years previously turned up in the paper. The copy had been stuck in the hydraulic system for a decade.
Reporters got an allowance of 3/6d a day for lunch or dinner and 3/- a week for tram or bus fares. None had a car, so for a country marking, free rail tickets were supplied by CIÉ.
Those were the days of the long, liquid lunch and when professional organisations held their annual dinners, dress was usually formal and Irish Times reporters covering them had to wear evening dress.
Now, newspaper life is far more sober, perhaps a little less congenial and a lot more competitive.
O'Shannon remembers one of the subeditors indulging in some four-letter invective as the demure Church of Ireland correspondent walked in with his weekly copy. "Do excuse him, he's our arts correspondent!" was the excuse.
He vividly recalls the strange scents that infused the place, old newsprint mixed with the smell of lead from the foundry where the metal plates for the press were made. "It was such a distinctive smell - it stays with you for ever. It was also very noisy, from all the linotypes, and when the great press started printing at 1am, the whole building shook".
These days printing is totally separated from editorial so newspaper offices are remarkably quiet.
In September 1951 disaster struck when fire swept through the offices just after a new printing press had been installed, causing much damage. That's why The Irish Times has so little photographic or other archival material from before that date. After the fire, much rebuilding had to be done on the Fleet Street side and new facilities were added, including a canteen.
The Dublin Evening Mail, in Parliament Street, came to the rescue, and for a while, The Irish Times was produced in its offices. Nine years later, in 1960, The Irish Times bought the Mail in a vain attempt to save it, but it closed in 1962. Another casualty of this time was the tabloid Sunday Review. Started in 1957, it lasted until 1963; it was too much ahead of its time.
In the 1960s and into the 1970s the modernising influence of its new editor, Douglas Gageby, transformed the paper, turning a small, conservative newspaper with a 30,000 circulation into something much more substantial and liberal, the voice of the Catholic middle class.
News editor Donal Foley had a remarkable ability for discovering female writing talent and many women journalists began to make their mark, including Maeve Binchy,Mary Maher, Christina Murphy, Renagh Holohan, Eileen O'Brien, Geraldine Kennedy and the irrepressible Nell McCafferty.
Young reporters such as Conor O'Clery, Kevin Myers, Henry Kelly, Fergus Pyle, later editor, Michael Viney, James Downey, Dermot Mullane and John Horgan cut their teeth and political coverage was transformed by Michael McInerney, John Healy, and later Dick Walsh. Coverage of the arts, business and sports were allowed to flourish, the latter under the sway of Paul McWeeney.
In 1974 The Irish Times Trust was established in a bid to safeguard the editorial independence of the paper from predatory press barons. The old shareholders sold their stakes in the company to a trust of public figures which would monitor the paper's implementation of a charter upholding basic commitments to political impartiality and pluralism in Irish society.
Although a break from the past, the new structure would be dominated still for many years by the company chairman and chief executive, Major Thomas Bleakely McDowell, who moved seamlessly from one era to the next. His fine oak-panelled office with a blazing fire fronted on D'Olier Street; known as "The Bunker", it was one of the great company secrets.
The front public office in Westmoreland Street remained untouched until 1976. Thereafter, that part of the site was occupied by the headquarters of the Educational Building Society. The focus of The Irish Time site shifted to Fleet Street and D'Olier Street, while the clock that was outside the old front office was eventually re-erected in D'Olier Street.
The next big revolution at the paper came in the summer of 1986, when the old rotary letterpress machine used for printing the paper was replaced by a brand new web offset press.
For the first time, The Irish Times could print colour. The first full colour advertisement in The Irish Times was for Brown Thomas, on August 18th, 1986.
That year saw the final retirement of Douglas Gageby, whose two spells as editor spanned Fergus Pyle's, and the appointment of Conor Brady as editor, the first Catholic to hold the job.
Typesetting had started to be computerised from 1978 and another revolution was under way: instead of typing out their copy which was then typeset by compositors, journalists now input their own copy into the computer system, "single key-stroking".
The new form of production and printing also meant that Brady, ably assisted by his deputy, Pat O'Hara, was able to dramatically expand the pagination of the paper and the number and regularity of supplements, now a daily feature. Pasting up pages evolved into all-electronic page creation and design.
There has always been a strong sense of family, often literally, throughout The Irish Times, from the caseroom to the newsroom.
The caseroom, where the linotype operators set the newspaper in hot metal before the introduction of computers, was always a hotbed of activity and friendly, if occasionally combustible, banter between journalists and printers.
The overseers and managers who ruled over this frequently frenetic kingdom had to be men of strong individuality such as Mick Costello, Jim Cooke, Pat Ruane and Paddy O'Leary.
The latter was renowned for his mantra, "Don't worry, God is good", most often used when the production world was crashing around his ears.
In recent years the technical and production leaps the newspaper made were driven by innovative individuals such as former director of technology Séamus McCague and former managing director Louis O'Neill.
The installation of that new press began a 20-year revolution in the way in which the newspaper is produced. Half way through that 20-year period, in 1994, The Irish Times became the online pioneer in newspaper publishing in these islands, when it launched its own website. Today, the printed and web versions of the paper co-exist side by side and who knows what changes the internet may bring in future.
And then, four years ago this month, in October 2002, Geraldine Kennedy was appointed editor, the first female editor of a national daily newspaper in Ireland.
Remarkably, the commercial operation of the paper was then also under the control of a woman, managing director Maeve Donovan.
Now the newspaper moves to the silent, smoke-free, largely sober confines of a gleaming new office - all has changed, changed utterly.