Joseph Pulitzer House

The Joseph Pulitzer House stands as a limestone monument to a man who transformed American journalism. After a devastating fire destroyed his previous residence and claimed the lives of two servants, the newspaper magnate commissioned architect Stanford White to build this home with an absolute requirement for fireproof construction. Completed in nineteen hundred and three, the mansion was modeled after the seventeenth century Palazzo Pesaro and Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice. Despite its outward grandeur, the building was designed to accommodate the publisher's near total blindness and an extreme sensitivity to noise that left him pained by even the smallest sound. Stanford White famously created plaster models of the house for Pulitzer to touch so he could conceptualize the architecture he could no longer see. To ensure his peace, Pulitzer insisted on a soundproof bedroom located at the rear of the property, far from the street and buffered by layers of silk threads stretched across chimney flues to dampen the slightest vibrations.