Biography | Gloria Steinem — The 32nd Street Building Where Ms. Began as an Insert

207 East 32nd Street is a narrow former bank building in Murray Hill.

Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast bought it in 1965 for Push Pin Studios.

In 1968 Glaser and Clay Felker launched New York magazine here.

Gloria Steinem was a founding writer and later a contributing editor.

She wrote The City Politic.

By 1971 she and a circle of women journalists wanted a magazine that treated women as the audience, not the recipe page.

Felker agreed to run a sample of the new title inside New York.

The insert appeared in the 20 December 1971 issue.

A standalone preview, dated Spring 1972, went on newsstands with a print run of 300,000 copies.

It sold out in eight days.

The first regular issue followed in July 1972.

Cofounders included Patricia Carbine and Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

The early office culture was as much a claim as the articles: talking circles, need-based pay, a child on a tricycle delivering mail.

Advertisers were hostile.

Readers were not.

On 15 November 2017 the block was renamed Ms. Magazine Way.

Steinem stood at the new sign with the local council member who had sponsored it.

The building later housed Glaser's studio until 2019.

The New York Review of Books bought it in 2020 and moved in during 2023.

The brick is still there.

The insert that proved the market was assembled at this address.

Photo: 207 East 32nd Street, 4C, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Gloria Steinem, 12 January 1972, Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News and World Report Collection, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.