To read The Voice was to read the progenitor of Craigslist and blogging, and of America’s underground cultural and political landscape in the second half of the last century and into this one. It was America’s story, but it was also New York’s: Donald Trump, the Obies and Off Broadway theater, rap and hip-hop, break dancing, civil rights, gay rights, Andy Warhol, post-punk, new wave, the Worst Landlords list, weird sports writing, outsider art, foodie culture, performance art, jazz, techno, the mob, Rudy Giuliani — all of it was covered by The Voice.

When I interned there for Frank Owen, who covered the underbelly of New York night life, in 1997, I didn’t understand I was working with living legends at 36 Cooper Square, like the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who did the first in-depth exposé on Mr. Trump’s businesses in the ’70s, and Nat Hentoff, the civil-libertarian columnist, both of whom died last year.

The paper was populated with eccentric geniuses and people who had changed journalism, including people who had worked on the first stories about the Stonewall Riots and the gay rights movement, and a number of cultural writers and icons. There was J. Hoberman, the film critic who had inherited the section from Andrew Sarris and Jonas Mekas, the two critics who helped put auteur theory and indie and experimental film on the map; there was Greg Tate and Nelson George, two of the pre-eminent voices on black music and hip-hop culture; and Richard Goldstein, the executive editor, who had been with the paper for more than 25 years and had been credited with the invention of rock criticism. And then there was Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed dean of rock critics, who had perfected the capsule review through his Consumer Guides, which gave records shrewd grades.