Three-Bedroom Spread in NYC’s Pulitzer Mansion Offers Taste of the Gilded Age

While you can’t buy yourself a Pulitzer Prize, for $4.5 million, you can buy a piece of a prize Pulitzer property. Currently on the market in Manhattan’s Upper East Side is a three-bedroom spread in the former mansion designed for publishing mogul Joseph Pulitzer by premier Gilded Age architect Stanford White of the illustrious firm McKim, Mead & White.

Completed in 1903, the four-story, limestone-clad residence’s design was modeled after a pair of 17th century Venetian palazzos. Costing $369,000 to construct, or roughly $9 million in today’s money, it featured a 50-foot ballroom, a basement swimming pool and squash court, and a custom-built electro-pneumatic Aeolian pipe organ.

The newspaper baron got to enjoy his baronial digs for about eight years before he passed away in 1911. Shortly thereafter, his family moved out and the magnificent mansion sat vacant for years. In the 1930s, it was converted into apartments, and then went co-op in 1952, after narrowly escaping a date with the wrecking ball.

Located half a block from Central Park, the co-op building contains a total of 16 units, the largest being a third-floor penthouse that traded hands in 2022 for $12 million. Among its notable former tenants are explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, said to have been the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones, and Paris Review co-founder John Train, whose three-bedroom, three-bath unit hit the market in November 2022 with an asking price of $7.5 million. Just six months later, the price of the late editor’s former residence, located on the first floor, has been drastically reduced by $3 million.

After passing through the building’s august, wood-paneled lobby (and getting past the doorperson on duty), visitors to the apartment enter a splendorous rotunda gallery with domed ceiling, ionic columns, and a fireplace with elaborately carved mantel. A set of towering glass doors opens to the living/dining room, which also brings the drama with chevron-patterned wood floors, bay windows, and a second fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves, complete with rolling library ladders, that go up to the sky-high ceilings.

Yet another fireplace anchors the primary bedroom, which also has elaborate moldings, numerous closets and French windows that look out onto the co-op’s main garden.

Dialing down the wow factor are the apartment’s simple galley kitchen, appointed with butcher-block countertops and hexagonal floor tile, and its second bedroom, which is considerably smaller than the first. However, the possibility of creating another suite equal in grandeur is dangled by the fact that the unit also comes with a sizable annex. Per the listing description, this one-bedroom, one-bathroom space originally held the mansion’s kitchen and still retains the original tiled ceilings and floors.

The storied residence is listed with Compass agent Gioia Zwack.