By STAR STAFF
Posted 11 hours ago
The iconic Sudbury Star building is for sale.
The prime downtown location, home to The Star since 1961, was put on the market last week. A successful sale would mark a bittersweet end to a long chapter in the paper’s history, publisher Bruce Cowan says.
There is no timeline for the sale and relocation within the city for the business operations, but Cowan said he’d like to it occur quickly, to minimize disruption for staff.
He said The Star will likely lease space in the city, either in one location that can accommodate both the office staff and The Star’s distribution centre, or two separate locations.
“It’ll be a challenge to leave,” he said. “There’s a lot of history here and a lot of stuff to relocate.”
The Star has always been located downtown.
It was founded in 1909 on Elgin Street, first in the Burroughs block, then the Grand Opera House (now the Empire block), followed by a move to a location across the street known as the Morin building (which later became the Star Restaurant).
After the First World War, the paper moved to the Gagne block at the corner of Frood Road (then Monck Street) and Elm Street. In 1955, The Sudbury Daily Star passed from local ownership into the hands of Thomson Newspaper Ltd. and, in 1961, the paper moved to new spacious quarters at 33 Mackenzie St., where it still resides.
Unfortunately, the building is now too spacious, Cowan says.
The building once bustled with a library and an archiving service, a press and a pre-press operation, a distribution centre and warehouse, the largest newsroom in Northern Ontario and a full complement of sales agents, circulators and office support staff.
However, technology allows a few people to do what once took teams of people working in shifts to do. As a result, much of the building now stands empty.
“It’s a great building. It has good bones and it’s an excellent location,” Cowan said. “But it’s not practical for us to maintain it anymore.”
Cowan said he has been working to put the building on the market and find other space to lease for more than a year. The Star has been owned by Sun Media since 2009 and the company has been divesting itself of real estate.
Cowan’s preference would be to keep with tradition and remain downtown, but the market has strengthened considerably in the past year — both a blessing and a curse, the publisher said.
“Hopefully it leads to a quick sale,” he said. “But then the real work begins in finding a new location.”
The building is listed at $1.3 million.
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