Bucks County Courier Times Building On The Market

The longtime home of the Bucks County Courier Times along Route 13 is on the market.

The 63,000-square-foot building near the Levittown Regional Rail Station in Tullytown sits on roughly 9 acres along the busy Northeast Corridor rail line. As of Monday, the property was listed at $2.4 million.

The real estate listing package for the property states the facility was constructed in 1959 and includes offices, a former printing press area, and a shipping and receiving area. A diagram of the building also shows what is listed as an apartment.

The newspaper is rumored to be looking at moving its operations to a leased office in the area of the Oxford Valley Mall in Middletown.

“We don’t have any signed leases at this point. We’ll announce our plans when a moves becomes imminent,” Shane Fitzgerald, the executive editor of the Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer, and Burlington County (New Jersey) Times, told LevittownNow.com.

Aside from housing the Bucks County Courier Times’ operations, the Tullytown building previously housed the executive offices of Calkins Media, which had owned newspapers and TV stations. Last summer, family-owned Calkins Media sold the Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer, Burlington County Times, and some of its other publications to hedge fund operated Gatehouse Media for $17.5 million.

The building on Route 13 was once where the paper was printed daily. That changed in the early 2000s when the Bucks County Courier Times and its sister papers began being produced at a new facility on Geoffrey Road in Falls Township.

The sale of the newspaper’s building has been expected since Gatehouse Media closed on Calkins Media last year. The company often sells off newspaper’s real estate and moves staff to lower-cost and smaller spaces after downsizing.

In the past year, the newspaper has seen employees take buyouts and get laid off as Gatehouse Media has consolidated costs. The majority of the design, customer service, and copy desk jobs were eliminate and outsourced over the course of several months last year. In the newsroom, a number of longtime reporters who covered local government and other news left the newspaper along with several sports scribes.

The Bucks County Courier Times building was opened in a time when Lower Bucks County was growing almost weekly. William Levitt’s development was welcoming thousands of families and the Levittown Shop-A-Rama was the premier shopping destination in the region.

Over the years, the reporters, pressmen, clerical workers, designers, and sales staffers in the building worked together put out newspapers with iconic headlines like “Kennedy Killed By Assassin,” “Astronauts Blast Off Moon,” and “Our Worst Day” on September 12, 2001.

In 1991, a distraught newspaper employee shot a security guard and two press operators with a 20-gauge shotgun inside the press room in the building following a domestic dispute with his girlfriend, also an employee at the newspaper. The distraught man shot his girlfriend in the leg in her Levittown neighborhood. All of the victims survived the shooting the pressman was sent to prison.

At a Tullytown Borough Council meeting earlier this year, the governing body asked the Bucks County Planning Commission to offer up potential redevelopment ideas for the newspaper site.

A former Calkins Media warehouse next to the Route 13 newspaper facility remains owned by by real estate holdings company that appears in county records to be connected to the newspaper’s previous owners. The one-acre property is looking for a new tenant, according to a sign on its side.