Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [156]
Although Pulitzer’s editors and staff could run the World satisfactorily in his absence, they could hardly find room to do their work in the cramped Park Row building he continued to rent from Jay Gould. The World needed a new building. Pulitzer owned a lot on Park Row, but it was too small for an edifice like the one he had in mind. He wanted a symbol of his power and success, something that would loom physically over the other Park Row newspapers as his paper had towered over them in circulation.
While Pulitzer was in California the previous year, French’s Hotel, which sat on a Park Row block at the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge, had been put up for sale. Twenty-three years earlier, as an unemployed Civil War veteran, Pulitzer had been thrown out of the hotel’s lobby because its guests objected to seeing tattered former soldiers milling about. Since then the hotel had fallen into financial trouble. Pulitzer seized the opportunity and with a $100,000 deposit agreed to pay $630,000 in cash for the site. The former derelict in the lobby now owned the place.
The architect George Brown Post, a student of Richard Morris Hunt, heard about Pulitzer’s purchase and wrote to a friend at the World asking to be recommended to his boss. Post had just completed a design for a new Park Row building for the New York Times. “It would be an interesting problem to construct two buildings in sight of each other for rival papers, and to make the buildings as different as the politics of the papers,” he wrote to his friend. Pulitzer decided to hold a design competition. Post entered and won.
From Paris, Pulitzer laid down his conditions. The building had to rise a full fourteen stories, making it the tallest on the globe. The cost could not exceed $950,000, and it had to be completed by October 1, 1890. If he succeeded, Post would receive a $50,000 commission and a $10,000 bonus. If he failed, he would repay $20,000 of the commission. Finally, all design elements had to be approved by Pulitzer before any contracts for the work were awarded. And, added Pulitzer, the final building had to be “at least as good at the Times building which is now in the process of construction.”
Over the winter Post worked on the design. As the months passed, Pulitzer grew increasingly frustrated. It had been his intention to hire an architect as one hires a portraitist, for his artistry, his vision, and his interpretation. That is not what he got from Post. In March, the architect came to Paris to go over the plans with Pulitzer. The meeting was not a great success. “In confidence of the strictest nature, I am bound to say that I am not encouraged to greater faith in our architect by this visit,” Pulitzer wrote to Turner, his business manager in New York. “He may be a great architect in carrying out other people’s ideas, but he certainly is not, in this case, carrying out many of his own.”
Money, of course, was also a point of contention between the two. Post was unable to remain within the budget. He persuaded Pulitzer to spend another $60,000, raising the maximum allowed above $1 million. “I will not allow another cent,” Pulitzer immediately informed Turner in New York. But since Pulitzer continued to insist that he be shown final drawings before any work was started at the site, the mandatory transatlantic consultations were bound to imperil the construction schedule and drive up the costs.
Post returned to New York, and the two continued their struggle by mail.
Pulitzer still considered his exile from New York a temporary affair. “I am glad to say that I am better in point of health, able to walk again,” he wrote to Turner, his business manager. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me generally except that my physical machinery is decidedly out of order and in need of repairs; but it is more a question of annoyance than serious danger I suppose—Anyway, the doctors tell me (and, I have enough of them the Lord