With Reporter’s Death, Recalling the Days Before He Stood Out

The great McCandlish Phillips was 81 when I called him in 2009 to ask about his time as a police reporter in New York in the 1950s. It was not a period he recalled fondly.

“I was at the first Shack in Brooklyn,” Mr. Phillips, who died on Tuesday at age 85, said.

Brooklyn

“The Shack” is the press corps’ decades-old nickname for the small offices reporters have occupied near or inside Police Headquarters in Manhattan. I was writing an article about that Shack, and I had never heard of a Brooklyn Shack, but Mr. Phillips, who had long since left journalism to spread God’s word, was not one to be interrupted. I dutifully took notes, and found them this morning when the news broke that he had died.

“It was a small rented storefront with a stamped-tin ceiling,” he said of the office, opposite the police station house at Bergen Street and Sixth Avenue in Prospect Heights. “Pre-Industrial Revolution coat lockers.”

About six newspapers shared space in the building in the mid-1950s, he said. The original Shack, in Manhattan, was a vibrant, colorful, profane place, and it still has its moments â€" albeit smoke-free, sober moments â€" on the second floor of 1 Police Plaza. But the Brooklyn Shack, in Mr. Phillips’s telling, sounded downright dull. He said reporters mainly fed information to writers in the main office. Indeed, there do not seem to be a wealth of clippings, by any stretch, reflecting on Mr. Phillips’s service in that place.

“The only story we ever ran out of the Shack in Brooklyn, it was a report of a car bombing,” he said. “Seven or eight reporters poured out,” he said, “into their cars, and we ran through all the red lights.”

“You could spend days and nights and weeks in the Shack with nothing to much excite you,” he said.

Finally, he made his escape. Unfortunately, he appears, by a look at the clippings, to have been long gone during one of the Brooklyn Shack’s more riveting moments, when two airliners collided in the air very near the Shack on Dec. 16, 1960, raining debris and bodies down on the streets.

Mr. Phillips, who would go on to win loads of prizes for his work, was writing about a water-pipe break a couple of weeks later. But it was in Manhattan, so that must have been fine with him.

“I wrote my way out of the Brooklyn Shack,” he said.