05/02/2023
Dedicated on May 1, 1916, the Pulitzer fountain was designed Thomas Hastings, with a sculpture by Karl Bitter. Taken at face value, it’s a celebration of abundance, featuring the Roman goddess Pomona holding a traditional horn of plenty.
But to understand its true message, you must travel back to Hungary in 1864, and meet seventeen-year-old Joseph Pulitzer. Desperate to escape poverty, he tries join the French Foreign Legion, but they take one look at this tall, frail young man with terrible eyesight…and laugh. The Austrian and British armies laugh even harder. But some less scrupulous recruiters are paying gullible lads to cross the Atlantic and fight in the American civil war. Though Pulitzer speaks no English, the Union Army puts a rifle in his hands and marches him south.
Somehow, he survives, learns English, and lands a job as a reporter. He turns the failing paper around, sells it, buys another, turns it around, sells it, eventually buying a struggling paper called the New York World where he tries everything: comic strips, illustrations, sports, women’s fashions, games, and contests, not to mention crime, crime, and more crime.
In just two years, the New York World becomes the country’s leading paper. But when Randolph Hearst, rival publisher of the New York Journal, comes nipping at his heels, facts become optional, as Pulitzer and Hearst invent the art of “fake news,” though back then it was called Yellow Journalism, and it was a race to the bottom… the bottom of a harbor in Havana, Cuba.
On the night of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine was resting at anchor, its crew asleep, when explosions tore through the ship, sinking the vessel in minutes, killing 261 sailors.
The cause was accidental. But Pulitzer and Hearst fabricated theories about enemy mines and torpedoes, pointing outraged fingers at the Spanish — "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” — thus igniting the Spanish-American War.
In later years, as his eyesight dimmed toward blindness, and he became so sensitive to noise that even a whisper seemed painfully loud, Pulitzer retreated from the world, obsessed with redeeming his reputation.
In his will, the king of yellow journalism endowed the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence.
He also left money for this fountain, whose real purpose is to forever wash the mud from his name.
Hear the whole story brought to life — with explosions! — in our Central Park tour, on the VoiceMap app.
