The Albany Herald is marketing its downtown Albany properties

ALBANY — With a recent uptick in downtown development interest, The Albany Herald is marketing its properties on Washington Street and Pine Avenue.

The properties, including The Albany Herald Building at 126 N. Washington St., and others in the 200 block of Washington and the 100 block of Pine, are being listed at $1.4 million.

“We remain fully committed to maintaining our Albany footprint,” Albany Herald General Manager Ken Boler said, “but it’s important to right-size to a facility that better serves our staffing and mission load.”

The Herald, founded in 1891, has operated from the three-story building on the corner of Washington and Pine for the past 30 years. The building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has more than 40,000 square feet of space. The other properties being marketed include warehouses and two parking lots. The properties are listed with Hughey & Neuman Inc. of Albany.

The newspaper, owned by Southern Community Newspapers Inc. (SCNI), has not made a decision to move from downtown but is exploring options that make sense for its publishing and web news and advertising operations.

“Like most other businesses and government agencies, we’ve found ourselves with more building than needed,” Boler noted. “We recently partnered with the city and Pretoria Fields Group and sold off several unused warehouses on Pine.”

That warehouse property sold earlier this year will be part of a new downtown craft brewery that is being developed.

The newspaper was located in the Pine Avenue buildings when its then-parent company, Gray Communications, purchased the Rosenberg Building at 126 N. Washington in February 1985 and renovated it. The next year, The Herald’s news and advertising operations moved to the first and second floors and Gray’s corporate offices to the third floor. The Herald’s circulation offices, which had remained on Pine, later moved to the first floor of the Washington Street building.

Gray Communications, which became Gray Television Inc. in 2002, left the publishing business in 2005. It remained a tenant occupying the third floor of The Herald building until 2015, when it moved its accounting and human resources operations to Atlanta.

Before its purchase by Gray, the Washington Street building had been vacant part of the time and used for various purposes after Rosenberg’s Department Store moved to the Albany Mall in 1978. The building had been the department store’s home for 72 years. Rosenberg’s left the mall in 1991 to a location on Westgate Boulevard before eventually closing.

SCNI also owns and operates six newspapers in the Atlanta area — the Gwinnett Daily Post, the Clayton News Daily, the Henry Daily Herald, the Jackson Progress-Argus, the Newton Citizen and the Rockdale Citizen.