The New York Herald Tribune, the broadsheet that ended publication 40 years ago, has returned, but don’t look for it on newsstands. Reporters, editors, and staff from the defunct paper gathered Tuesday at their former office building at 230 W. 41st St. — the present site of the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism — for a reunion at which a New York Herald Tribune scholarship fund was announced. The beneficiary will be a graduate student able “to uphold the name and the spirit of the Herald Tribune,” Dean Stephen Shepard said.

Myron Kandel, who was the financial editor in the Herald Tribune’s last years and went on to become founding financial editor at CNN, said the Herald Tribune was unrivaled in its ability “to provide an unbiased news report with flair, reliability, and credibility.”

A former literary editor at the paper, Dick Kluger, who wrote a history of the Herald Tribune, called the Tribune “simply the best American newspaper now deceased.” He was unable to attend the event.

The paper’s origin goes back to the 19th century, when James Gordon Bennett began the New York Herald and Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune; they merged in 1924. Despite an infusion of capital by Publisher John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the paper — an incubator of the lively New Journalism — ended after a series of strikes.

“I walk away from all defeats,” writer Jimmy Breslin said. “It was great while it lasted.” He said it was his first time back to the building.

“What a stellar cast,” Mr. Kandel said of those who attended the reunion. They included the paper’s last editor, James Bellows; David Laventhol, who was later editor and publisher of Newsday and president of Times Mirror Co.; a Tribune managing editor who later became president of NBC News, Richard Wald; photographer Morris Warman; movie reviewer Judith Crist; novelist Tom Wolfe; and a former foreign editor at the New York Tribune, Harry Rosenfeld, who later became metropolitan editor at the Washington Post who prodded Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “like a football coach,” as that duo later wrote.

The interior of the old Tribune offices “had no relationship to anything that I had known,” Mr. Breslin said, adding that when he was there the presses and other machines recalled the “Industrial Revolution.” He said he was used to desks littered with paper and the clacking of typewriters. “Words,” he said, “are produced best by noise.” Nowadays, he said, journalists use “computers and health clubs.”

Mr. Shepard’s response to those who said the offices were very clean was, “We’re only a month old. We haven’t had time to mess it up yet.” The journalism program he leads has 57 students, about a dozen of whom attended the party.

The Herald Tribune newsroom used to be on the fifth floor, which now houses the City University budget office. The journalism school is on the third and fourth floors. Roger Herz, who worked at the Herald Tribune as a copy boy in the summer of 1952, recalled sending copy by pneumatic tube down to the composing room on the fourth floor.