A tour that maps the movement of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine’s New York offices is a journey through Manhattan’s historic business districts. The excursion ranges from the East side to the West side. It gets into the fifties and ends up at our newest digs near the Brooklyn Bridge.

The only office I never set foot in was the first one. Near 18th Street, 267 Park Avenue South was the headquarters for Davis Publications. The offices were just up the street from Union Square and not far from New York’s famous Flatiron Building. When he founded Asimov’s, Joel Davis was already the publisher of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Apparently the built-in bookshelves in the office were all specially constructed for it and other periodicals. The wooden shelves were painted white, and made to house digest-sized magazines. One case was even designed specifically to hold unsolicited manuscripts. Although no one from those old offices remains with the magazines, those bookshelves have accompanied us to all our subsequent locations.

In 1978, Davis Publications moved into the Chanin Building at 380 Lexington Avenue. This elegant art-deco edifice was the tallest building in New York City when it was erected in 1929. Too soon, the building’s height was eclipsed by its more famous cousin—the Chrysler Building—which happens to stand kitty-corner to it. When I went to work for Davis Publications in December 1981, the lobby was looking a little tarnished. Indeed, all of New York seemed to have an air of faded gentility. The windows in Grand Central Terminal across the street had been painted black during the Second World War to protect the station and the city from bombing raids. They stayed that way until 1988. Restoration began on both structures late in that decade. Once the true grandeur of the pre-war train station and the sumptuousness of the Chanin Building’s lobby were revealed, I often wondered what I’d done to deserve such beauty in my life.

During the ten years that I worked for Joel Davis (and the one extra year that we stayed in the building after the fiction digests were sold to Bertelsmann Media and merged with Dell Magazines), I inhabited seven different rooms on two separate floors. Various office mates included the editorial assistants of Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines, Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance Magazine, and Analog, as well as Shawna McCarthy and Gardner Dozois, two former editors of Asimov’s. Neither the editors nor I had offices to ourselves until we were sold to Bertelsmann. With all those moves we learned to travel light, but we still managed to amass a huge number of files and back issues of the magazines.

Our new owners brought us a new publisher, an Austrian named Chris Haas-Heye. As he readied us for the oncoming move, he constantly urged us to “divest, divest, divest” of all unnecessary papers, files, and magazines. Historians may weep, but we were several tons lighter when we took up residence as the very first tenants in the brand new Bertelsmann Building located at 1540 Broadway.

The Bertelsmann Building is in the heart of Times Square. Although it was an exciting place to work, it wasn’t the shiny Times Square that we know today. While I could approach the building from several directions, there was only one circuitous route that didn’t take me past a sex shop. This was in contrast to the desolate theater a couple of blocks away that was home only to a gentleman with a megaphone who relentlessly informed us that we were all headed for eternal damnation. While those shops are long gone and the theater now houses The Lion King, we too moved on around 1997, several months after Dell Magazines was sold to Penny Publications.

Our travels took us to Rockefeller Center and the same building that houses Radio City Music Hall. A lovely perk was the annual summer notification of eligibility for discounted tickets to the Christmas Spectacular. Due to complicated reasons and good fortune, I found I had an enormous corner office to myself. (Gardner Dozois always wanted to know where I planned to put the swimming pool.)

Alas, such luxuries were relatively short lived. In 1999, we were packed off to Park Avenue South, not far from the Empire State Building. Although ten blocks south, it felt a bit like a return to our old Chanin neighborhood. Restaurants, which are a bit overpriced in tourist areas like Times Square and Rockefeller Center, were more economical and diverse. My daily walk across town from Penn Station took me through Little Korea, and we were only a few blocks north of an area that is densely packed with Indian restaurants and grocery stores.

Now we are moving once again—this time to a beautiful location in an older part of the city. Once again, we’ve been divesting ourselves of files and magazines. Masses of issues and anthologies have been shipped off to Walter Reed Hospital, the USO, schools, and science fiction conventions. We’ll arrive at 267 Broadway a leaner and meaner machine. The frenzied cleaning has already unearthed my college correspondence with Rod Serling that had been missing for years and letters from Arthur Clarke I didn’t know I’d lost. The new office overlooks the park around City Hall. For the first time, I’ll be in a workplace where the streets are named instead of numbered. Since the island of Manhattan narrows there, and the office is close to many subways, I don’t expect to get too lost. It’s not far from Wall Street and the South Street Sea Port and it’s only half a mile from my hairdresser’s salon in Chinatown. As I approach the latest stop on the Asimov’s tour, I can’t wait to begin exploring some more sidewalks of New York.