The lead engraving of Joseph Pulitzer’s retirement message from 1907 has been removed, along with much of the rest of the interior of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s former headquarters.

The engraving will be replaced in the remodeled building with a version etched in glass. But the newspaper has already moved to a smaller home in a nearby building owned by the StarWood Group, a developer and investment firm that has big plans for the old newsroom.

The blocklong building in downtown St. Louis, which has 285,000 rentable square feet, is one of at least 15 newspaper sites nationwide that have been sold since 2012 as technological and advertising changes rip through the print journalism business.

Like the Post-Dispatch headquarters — a fabled hub of civic power that boasted cavernous subterranean rooms for bolts of paper and barrels of ink delivered via railroad link from the old Union Station nearby — many former newspaper sites are being redeveloped to appeal to 21st-century technology companies, urban homeowners and even beer connoisseurs.