In 1955, newspapers were products of the industrial age: loud, clamorous places with clattering teletypes, smoldering ashtrays, Linotype machines that spit hot lead and a deep rumble when the presses rolled. It was a hard, heavy-metal world you could feel, taste and smell.

Not today. Today's newspapers are more refined: a quieter, carpeted world of megabytes, e-mail and ergonomics. The old technologies are gone. There are no more darkrooms, no more hot type and certainly no more cigarettes.

The Columbian completes its transition into the digital age this weekend with the move into a new six-story building at 415 W. Sixth St., an elegant, graceful structure totally befitting its stature on Esther Short Park. It mirrors downtown's shift from blue collar to white.

The newspaper's printing press, still indispensable in the digital age, will remain at the paper's old building two blocks away. But the new offices embrace the future with all the latest technological advances to help collect, compile and share the news of our community. And it may even wind up with a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, testifying to its environmental responsibility, which was definitely not part a factor in the 1955 building.

Something, though, will get lost in the process.

Five decades on deadline

The paper has called the white, low-slung building at 701 W. Eighth St. home since Aug. 22, 1955, through thousands of employees and something close to 16,000 publication days. The paper leaves behind not just that history but a hodgepodge of a headquarters that's been revamped, repaired, remodeled and renovated maybe a dozen times - no one is exactly sure - through the past half century.

It has half-floors, odd mezzanines, hidden stairwells, a dumbwaiter, a door opening onto a 9-foot drop, a basement once used for employee archery practice and heavy-duty fire doors that look like they came off a liberty ship.

It's a hybrid, explained Scott Campbell, the publisher whose grandfather bought the paper in 1921. At one point, the paper kept two carpenters on staff to keep up with the renovations.

"Every time we'd go shopping for another thousand square feet," he said, "it was, 'Where can we put it?' " Sometimes, like in the aerie that became the paper's editorial department, it meant hanging new offices from the high ceilings.

Once, newspaper buildings were a focal point for the community. Crowds gathered as staffers posted updates on elections, prizefights or the World Series on big boards. Gatherings outside newspaper offices these days usually have other motives.

If people could even find them, that is. Most newspaper buildings are notoriously non-descript. But not all. The Post-Intelligencer in Seattle has a giant globe. The Tribune Tower in Chicago has rocks taken from famous structures around the world. But outside of those, there aren't many others.

A modern marvel

The designer of the Columbian's 1955 building was Day Hilborn, a well-known local architect who also designed the Clark County Courthouse and the Kiggins Theater. Strange as it might seem today, the building is considered an example of modern architecture, circa 1955.

"It was on the leading edge of that," said Rob Barrentine of the firm Barrentine Bates. "A few points were modern architecture. There aren't too many examples of that era of modern architecture remaining in Vancouver."

Today, 701 W. Eighth St. is a broad, sprawling complex of buildings on 5.6 acres. It grew from 23,000 square feet in 1955 - only two-thirds of that needed on opening day - to 110,000 square feet today. A 1968 addition housed the new Goss offset press, still in use after nearly 40 years, and an adjacent packaging center. In the 1980s, the paper bought the Maxwell Co., a fishing tackle supply company, next door and expanded again.

Other renovations came inside the existing shell, including a glass-fronted mezzanine in the main newsroom that houses editorial writers who, if they so desire, can gaze down and ponder. Other mezzanines, half-floors and additions created a hodgepodge atmosphere that helps give the building its character.

"We squeezed those upper spaces in," said Lyle Spears of Vancouver's DSP Architecture, which handled many of the renovations over the last several decades.

That meant many new offices without windows. The paper's computer department, for example, has no windows. But it does have a door that opens onto nine-foot drop to the loading dock. The door is used to load equipment into the computer department that won't fit up the narrow stairwell.

The improvised layout has led to some communication lapses, like when the sports department was tucked into a side office. A sports reporter walked into the newsroom one day and was puzzled to find the place absolutely empty. Then the police scanner crackled with a mention of The Columbian, and he realized what had happened. Someone had phoned in a bomb threat and the staff had vacated the building without ever notifying the people in sports.

Views into the past

Two giant aerial photographs that dominate the newsroom and advertising departments won't accompany their departments to the new building. One shows the Columbia River Gorge; the other shows downtown Vancouver sometime in the late 1970s. They were hand-colored.

Artifacts of the past remain, like the darkrooms that housed chemical tray printing and the light-tight black revolving doors used to enter them.

What used to be the composing room is now home to creative services, which designs ads. Once, the room housed eight or nine Linotype machines, which set the paper's body type and would occasionally splatter hot lead in the process. It wasn't easy to design a floor to withstand such a pummeling, Spears said. It had to be sufficiently resistant to hot lead but soft enough to preserve the workers' knees. Douglas fir was the solution, he said. The room is carpeted now but the scarred, pitted floor is still visible in an obscure corner the carpeting didn't quite reach.

The room was off-limits to most of the staff, with a sign saying "Absolutely no admittance" on the door from the newsroom. At one point, Campbell said, employees needed a signed slip from a supervisor to enter, emblematic not just of the dangerous conditions but the general state of union-management relations.

People make the paper

The most important monument to any newspaper building may be the sweat and toil of the people who work there. On some days, The Columbian newsroom really is the stuff of newspaper fable, a rush of phone calls and shouts in the urgency of getting news out quickly, accurately and honestly.

It was at times an irreverent culture. A letter from an unhappy state legislator hung in the newsroom for years. He said the paper was only fit for lining birdcages ­- and even then, it would insult the birds. Women used a men's room once during remodeling of the women's room. The men, upon their return, found a clothesline draped with women's underwear as a gag.

Some days brought terrible grief. In the summer of 1978, the newsroom was packed with employees, friends and other Northwest editors for a memorial service to Jack Campbell, the paper's editor and co-publisher. May 18, 1980 brought not just the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens but the death of Reid Blackburn, a staff photographer who died that morning while shooting from a nearby ridge. Six years later, photographer Ralph Perry died in a helicopter crash also near Mount St. Helens.

But happier human emotions prevailed. The building can boast of being the meeting place for no fewer than 32 couples who eventually got married, including Scott Campbell, who met his future wife, Jody, at the paper.

The future of 701 W. Eighth St. isn't yet clear. The paper is putting 22,000-square-feet up for lease, complete, should the new tenant desire, with desks and office equipment.

The move unsettles Campbell, but only a little. He was born the year after the building opened and still has his first pay stub from when he was 7, for a weekend job hauling lead filler bars from the storage room to the production floor. Today, he occupies the same office used by his father, Donald, where a photo of his grandfather hangs in the same spot on the wall it has held since the building opened in 1955.

"It's going to be weird," he said. "I've grown up here. It's been an amazing journey."