Puck Building

The Puck Building is the fortress a humor magazine built — the seven-story Romanesque block on Lafayette Street that Joseph Keppler raised in 1885–86 to house Puck, the satirical weekly he had launched in German in 1876 and in English a year later. At its peak Puck was the most influential humor magazine in America, skewering every public figure of the Gilded Age in full-color lithographs, and its headquarters was called 'the largest building in the world devoted to the business of lithographing and publishing' — nearly eight acres of floor space.

The building advertises itself the way the magazine did: two gilded statues of Puck — Shakespeare's imp, the magazine's mascot — stand guard over the Houston and Mulberry corner and the Lafayette entrance, sculpted by Henry Baerer with the motto 'What Fools These Mortals Be!' Albert Wagner designed it in three phases, and when the city sliced Lafayette Street through the footprint in 1899, Wagner took the cut and rebuilt the face. Puck died in 1918; the building outlived it by a century, and in the 1980s it was saved from demolition to become offices, event space, and — fittingly — the home of Spy magazine, the next generation's satire.

The file keeps the Puck Building: the magazine's fortress, the golden imp still grinning at Houston Street, and the printing district survivor that outlasted its paper.

The Puck Building is the archive's satire file — the humor magazine's palace, the gilded mascot, and the building that survived its own punchline.