Weird experience, today.

I went “home” to the building where I spent 29 years as a working professional. To the 399 North D Street offices of the San Bernardino Sun.

The Sun abandoned the site in October of 2005. And sold the whole-city-block property to a Korean-born businessman named Harry Hwang. The newspaper and its MediaNews overlords then left downtown Berdoo, forfeiting its intimate connection to city hall and the county courthouse for an antiseptic new building in the light-industrial zone in the city’s north end. A part of town Real Readers don’t see. Unless they are in the Lowe’s parking lot and happen to look west, while they’re loading bags of manure into their SUVs.

I hadn’t been inside the historic Sun site for almost three years, and it really took me back in time. It was like going back to your childhood home … except I had to concede the new owners had taken “my” old house and improved on it.

I was there to talk to Dr. Don Singer, president of American Sports University — the college Dr. Hwang always wanted to create and, now, has.

ASU is about getting students ready for a career in the sports world. Not as athletes, but in a variety of fields that have grown up around professional sports — marketing, coaching, training, recreation.

One of those fields is sports journalism, a course of study the school intends to offer … and a field I know a little something about. Hence, my meeting with Dr. Singer today. Eventually, the school is going to offer journalism classes, and maybe someday I might be part of that. I believe I would be good at it, and would like it.

That’s all out there in the future, if/when the school’s enrollment climbs and it becomes a lightning rod for the renaissance of downtown San Bernardino.

What I can tell all The Sun alumni is what the place looks like, now that the paper is gone.

I should confess  up front that I get attached to places. I can remember feeling melancholy when I had to leave the premises of The Daily Forty-Niner, in college — and that was a place I worked for a grand total of four semesters over two years. And I was 22 when I left.

Imagine, then, my feelings about 399 North D Street. Where I worked so long, with so many memorable people. (Some of whom I have been writing about in the Seasons in the Sun series.)

I asked Dr. Singer if I could look around the building. He was kind enough to give me a tour.

The administrative offices are in the northwest corner of the building, on the first floor. Where the newspaper’s business offices used to be. You know, the area reporters never went into, back there behind the cashier’s window where subscribers could pay for their newspaper — or we could get change for the vending machines.

The area that was devoted to classified advertising (to your right, as you walked in the D Street main door) is now an open room, a sort of speaker’s area, with rows of chairs facing south. Singer said Hwang plans to turn the room into a sports museum, eventually.

We went back into what was the production area of the paper. Singer had an idea that the cafeteria was there, once upon a time, but he wasn’t sure where. It actually was across the way from the area he thought it was. By the time I got there, it already had devolved into a vending-machine area, but it had been a real cafeteria not long before.

The area where hot-lead compositors and, later, paste-up workers, had labored looked largely unused. No lights were on, anyway. I told Singer that some of the most frenetic activity had taken place in that area. All the deadline stuff. I have a mental picture of a someone rolling a page just before it was snatched up and taken to the camera room — with a furtive glance at the clock.

We went on through the old camera room … and into the area where the “dinky press” had been, toward the end. The area where former Sun sports clerk Nick Johnson had snuck in one night to print some signs for his fraternity, been caught and subsequently fired. Yeah, that room. (It now has some dummies, perhaps for martial-arts practice?)

Singer didn’t realize that The Sun’s old press had been on the other side of the wall to our left. Back when we were printed in black-and-white. That press had been dismantled and sent to India, I heard, two decades ago.

We kept walking. We reached the area where the refurbished offset press had been installed, in the early 1980s, so The Sun could be a regional print site for the great experiment known as USA Today. (Gannett owned The Sun as well as USA Today.) Those presses, which ran along Fourth Street almost to Arrowhead, are gone now, too … maybe to some other site in Asia … and have been replaced by a big (if narrow) open area with three basketball hoops.

To the right (south) of the press/basketball room is a very large area now given over to athletic pursuits. I recall a large surface covered with a wrestling-mat sort of surface. (It had been concrete, back in the day.) And at the end of the room where newspapers rolled off the “new” press and were bundled, stuffed with inserts and put on trucks … is now given over to a mixed-martial-arts octagon, among other exercise machines.

(American Sports University apparently sells memberships to local people who can use their facilities for midday workouts. Singer said Pat Morris, mayor of San Bernardino, has been over to work out on the new equipment.)

We went back to the main building and headed to the southwest corner, where display advertising had been located. The area had been divided into classrooms; three, maybe four of them. We walked by so Singer could show me the old Fox Theater part of the building — the part of the interconnected edifice the newspaper had almost never utilized.

(Some history of the Fox theater that not even I knew, after 29 years on the premises, can be found here.)

ASU has opened up an area once closed off to the rest of the newspaper, and the floor of the grand old theater (a Spanish Revival-style movie palace in the 1930s and 1940s) was covered by tables and chairs. It had been used the night before to host a dinner for recognition of police officers and also gets some rental use as a banquet hall. I had never seen the room like that. When the newspaper had the place, the main part of the Fox theater was used to store giant rolls of newsprint. And that was it. You had to go to certain peepholes to peer into that area, which generally was dark and looked creepy.

Now it’s open and airy and could function as a student union, perhaps, someday.

My tour was over … but I asked Singer to take me upstairs, where the newsroom had been. He obliged. As we went up the main stairway, I told him that the alcove at the foot of the stairs had been where the newspaper’s telephone operator had worked … and later where a security officer sat.

As we went up the two flights of stairs, I saw the markings still on the walls where the blown-up photos by Sun staffers had hung. (I still remember the one taken, from Redlands, on a brilliantly sunny day, with tall, waving palm trees in the foreground and the snow-covered San Bernardino mountains in the background.)

We turned left, at the top of the stairs, and passed the library (the one disassembled in 2005, and never reassembled at the new site).

We stepped inside the conference room, and for a moment I felt as if the newspaper had never left. The conference room looked as if we might have had a Sun seminar in there a day before.

The huge, aerial map of the paper’s core market (from Rancho Cucamonga to Yucaipa) still stretches along the east wall. A snapshot in time (I suppose all snapshots are), showing the development of the valley in the mid-1980s. I noted how the area where I was to live, in East Highlands Ranch, had seen some of the old orange groves torn out (the areas appear white, on the map) but no building yet begun.

The same tables were there. The same chairs. The dry-erase boards at the south end of the room … still there. The movie screen, still there. I could envision the spot where former Sun publisher Jerry Bean sat, sweating like Nixon, during the vote-counting for the 1986 union push. News meetings had been held in that room. Planning sessions. Gannett seminars. I remember Steve Lambert being introduced as The Sun’s editor, there, by Dave Butler in 2002.

Anyway, Sun alumni, that’s one spot you would recognize.

Dr. Hwang has taken over the publisher’s office. Makes sense. It has an ante-room for a secretary. Also, I think there’s a private restroom in there.

We went back down the hall to the main part of the newsroom.

It is all classrooms now. Divided up into about four areas. with chairs. Yeah, the metro people were in there (and years before, features and sports) … and then we came to another recognizable area of the building — the editor’s office.

It’s pretty much unchanged, as well. Empty, but still there, with the glass walls. The fenced off area just outside the office, where the newsroom secretary sat … still there. Pretty much the same. And the smaller office, which served as a little conference room, for a time, and later became the managing editor’s office … almost untouched.

We reached the corner and turned right, heading for the photo lab. Also almost untouched. The sliding round door for going into and out of the dark room … still there. The room where photogs did their flash/posed photography … still there. And the walls that created a couple of little offices … still standing and adorned by some ancient sports photos the new owners found. One of them was a celebration photo of a San Bernardino Valley College baseball game — SBVC being the school were Singer once was president.

We reversed course and went to the northwest corner of the second floor, where sports had been, the last decade-plus. And features. It now is sectioned off into a classroom. At the moment, it has eight massage tables set up. Singer said classes in massage were to be conducted in there. I motioned toward the corner, where the sports editor’s office — mine — had been. Just a corner in an empty room, now.

We went back downstairs. Singer went back to work. I returned to the year 2008.

I have interviewed for jobs only a handful of times in my life. Two of them have been in the same building in San Bernardino, albeit 32 years apart and for different companies and different jobs.

Perhaps I am meant to return to that spot. I certainly feel very much attuned to it. I spent most of my adult life at that address, or on my way to it, or on the way to my house.

The old neighborhood, the old rooms. The people and the desks and everything that went on in there. I can almost feel the raw energy of a daily newspaper. I can hear the ghosts whispering. I see dead people.

Maybe I will be back there someday. I think I would find it far more comforting than spooky.

And I would be happy to have old Sun alumni come by and look at what they might recognize … and what the new owner has fixed, expanded and improved upon. I wish them luck; I’d like to see the old building as a living, thriving place again, a key part of downtown San Bernardino.