Algonquin Round Table History Pulitzer Landmarks Tied to the Algonquin Round Table

Pulitzer Landmarks Tied to the Algonquin Round Table

This guest blog was written for Literary Manhattan.

I love literary landmarks. I seek them out whenever I possibly can. I’m the kind of person who can’t pass a plaque or historical marker and not stop for a look, and when the site is tied to an author or book, it’s even better. When I was writing my new book, The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide, I decided to make it a guidebook to everything related to the Vicious Circle in New York: their homes, offices, speakeasies, theaters, and related locations.

Several of the locations in my book have ties to the Pulitzer family that are shared here. If you have never been to Woodlawn Cemetery, take a trip to the beautiful landmark in the Bronx. The Pulitzer graves are incredibly touching to see placed there.

Here are two in Manhattan that you might want to visit if you get the opportunity. I enjoyed putting them in the book because they show that even though there is no longer a Pulitzer newspaper in the city, his literary landmarks are still around us.

The New Yorker has a long history of sticking its nose into matters of frivolity around New York City, and the magazine loves a good crusade. E. B. White complained vociferously about advertising in Grand Central Terminal, and editor Harold Ross, a commuter, testified at a city hearing against public address announcements in the terminal.

The magazine also took up the cause of the dirty bronze statue of Pomona, goddess of abundance, outside the Plaza Hotel in Grand Army Plaza. When New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer died in 1912, he bequeathed $50,000 to build it. Carrere & Hastings designed the Italian Renaissance-style fountain, which was dedicated in 1916. But in The New Yorker of April 18, 1931, poet Arthur Guiterman complained that the fountain was a mess. The last stanza of “Letter to Mr. Pulitzer” reads:

One hates to speak this way about a lady,
But she is obviously much too shady;
Though still quite young, a good bit under thirty,
No nymph was ever quite so black and dirty
In all New York; so you, sir, as her guardian
(You see I’m Mid-Victorian, not Edwardian),
Should personally scrub her form and face in
The sudsy foam of her own fountain basin.

A few weeks later the magazine published a response by Pulitzer’s son, Ralph, publisher of the World:

For know! The lady’s guardians ad litem,
Aroused by her attempts to mock and spite ’em,
Have joined the city in a contribution
To give her an immaculate ablution;
To scrub her from her head, with all its wet locks,
Clear down her contours to her very fetlocks.

Ralph Pulitzer donated $30,000 to restore the statue. Doris Doscher, the model who posed for sculptor Karl Bitter as Pomona, wrote to the New York Times: “I want to take this opportunity to offer my thanks to Mr. Pulitzer for enabling me to again stand exalted—and scrubbed—above the grounds on Fifth Avenue, generously spurting precious, clear water—flush, in these times of dried-up prosperity.”

The saga of the statue and Pulitzer Fountain is a long-running city drama. It was renovated in 1971 but, due to faulty plumbing, went dry for six years in the 1980s. In 1989, $3.3 million was raised privately to restore it yet again.

The World stood at 63 Park Row, with editorial offices on the eleventh floor of a tower that Pulitzer erected in 1890. A golden dome topped the 309-foot tall building. Pulitzer died in 1911, and the paper ran along for twenty more years.

Star reporter Herbert Bayard Swope became executive editor in 1921 and brought in the best talent, increasing high-quality reporting and also hiring New York’s first black reporter. By the time the Round Table came to it, the highly respected World was the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” Swope receives credit for creating the page opposite the editorial page—the “Op. Ed.”—a phrase he coined. Onto this page he brought a lively mix of writers, most from the Vicious Circle. Among the first of them to write for the World was Robert Benchley a month after he quit Vanity Fair in 1920. Benchley’s book reviews often had nothing to do with the books themselves and could easily contain ruminations on train schedules.

Swope stole both Heywood Broun and Franklin P. Adams (known as F.P.A.) from the Tribune in 1921. The 33-year-old Broun could write anything, from a play review to a recap of the Harvard-Yale football game. He had free rein in his column “It Seems to Me,” which ran for six years, to discuss books, sports, movies, or politics. The last of these landed him in hot water. When F.P.A. brought his famous “Conning Tower” to the Op. Ed. Page, it caused a sensation. Ralph Pulitzer and his brothers broke the family trust by court order in 1931 and sold the newspaper. It put more than 3,000 people out of work.

Today no plaque or monument marks the former Pulitzer Building and its wonderful gold dome. Before it was razed in 1955, Swope and F.P.A. toured the deserted newsroom one last time. It is now a highway approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. The stained glass windows from the city room were moved to Columbia University’s Journalism School building, 2950 North Broadway, where, each year in the World Room, the Pulitzer Prize winners are announced.

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Frank Sullivan Place

Frank Sullivan of Saratoga SpringsFrank Sullivan of Saratoga Springs

Frank Sullivan Home, Saratoga Springs

Frank Sullivan Home, Saratoga Springs


After the demise of the New York World in 1931, Algonquin Round Table member Frank Sullivan moved home to Saratoga Springs and became the ultimate freelancer. In a small clapboard house shared with his sister at 135 Lincoln Avenue, he turned out marvelous humor pieces for the rest of his career. “Once I visited New York for twenty years but I wouldn’t live there if you gave me Philadelphia,” he wrote. “A small town is the place to live. I live in a small town 180 miles from New York and while I would not say it has New York beat by a mile I would put the distance at six furlongs.”

Over the years, New Yorkers such as Harold Ross and Marc Connelly visited Sullivan, who took them to the racetrack, two blocks from his house, which treated him like royalty. He picked up the nickname “The Sage of Saratoga” and worked until his early eighties. He wrote for The New Yorker for fifty years as well as the Times sports section, the Saturday Evening Post, and Town & Country, his work collected in half a dozen books.

Sullivan suffered a series of falls in his home, and his health deteriorated. He died in Saratoga Hospital on February 19, 1976, at age 83. He is buried in the family plot St. Peter’s Cemetery in Saratoga Springs.

Frank Sullivan Place

Frank Sullivan Place

Today he is immortalized with a street sign nearby the racetrack, Frank Sullivan Place. His house was named a literary landmark, and is privately owned.

Adapted from The Algonquin Round Table New York, A Historical Guide (Globe Pequot Press) available here.

FPA

Franklin P. Adams DayFranklin P. Adams Day

Today is the natal day of Franklin P. Adams, born on this day in 1881 in Chicago. During his days in New York City, he famously had joint birthday parties with his pal and poker-playing friend, George S. Kaufman (Nov. 16). There are many, many stories about FPA online and in The Lost Algonquin Round Table and The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide. But there is news today, on his birthday.

FPA

Franklin P. Adams and his second wife, Esther Root, on their honeymoon, 1925.

Recently I was given the huge honor by the descendants of FPA to safeguard his papers and archives. Tony Adams, last surviving son of FPA and his second wife, Esther Root Adams, gave to me FPA documents, letters, photographs, and ephemera. I will be using some of that material for my next book, The Lost Algonquin Round Table 2, due out late next year. One thing about FPA, he saved everything. So on this birthday, raise a cocktail to FPA. He deserves to be remembered today and every day. Look for his books on eBay and in used book stores. He has been out of print since the 1960s, which is pretty sad to me. If you are a fan of FPA, drop me a line.

Also, be sure not to miss the post today from Trav SD about FPA.

Robert Benchley

Listen to The Secret Life of Walter MittyListen to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Today is the 74th anniversary of recording The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1944).

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with Robert Benchley. Recorded for CBS on Dec. 20, 1944. Based on the 1939 short story by James Thurber, this is the full radio dramatization. It comes from “This Is My Best” radio series. Thurber praised Benchley’s performance, and didn’t like the 1947 Danny Kaye musical comedy version. Mogul David Selznick approached Benchley in 1940 about making a short film based on the Mitty story that first appeared in The New Yorker, but it didn’t work out. Less than a year after this recording was made, Benchley died in New York. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is included in “Thurber Writings and Drawings” (Library of America series).

From The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Lyons Press, 2015), by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, with a foreword by Anthony Melchiorri.