Disreputable Lady

Their friends have long poked fun at Brothers Ralph, Herbert and Joseph Pulitzer for spending too much money on their Lady of the Plaza. In the flesh she is curvesome Model Doris Doscher of Whitestone, N. Y. In bronze, across from Manhattan's Hotel Plaza, she is the work of the late Sculptor Karl Bitter and his successor, Isidore Konti. Her name is Abundance (see cut, p. 49).

The late great Joseph Pulitzer's will left $50,000 for a statue "at some suitable place on Central Park preferably on 59th Street." By the time his sons placed the statue where he desired they had spent out of pocket $10,000 more than the bequest. For the sake of symmetry the Pulitzers also had to pay for moving Augustus St. Gaudens' heroic General Sherman on horseback, on the other side of 59th Street. When everything was completed in 1915 and water began to flow into a series of Kentucky limestone basins. General Sherman found himself headed straight for the Lady of the Plaza. For years their affair across 59th Street was the talk of the town.

By 1928 the Lady of the Plaza had fallen into such disrepute that the city turned off the water from her urn. Her porous limestone base had sucked up moisture like blotting paper, had cracked and chipped with each winter's freeze. So dirty and neglected were her face and body that Versifier Arthur Guiterman complained about it in The New Yorker. In an answering rhyme Ralph Pulitzer promised action.

He offered $15,000 for a new base if the city would give $10,000. The city agreed. But an architect's committee argued so long that the time limit for the city appropriation was exceeded and the Pulitzers had to make up the $10,000 difference. Finally selected was a waterproof Italian marble from Trieste which would not crack or chip. But it cost $35,000. Once again the Brothers Pulitzer made up the $10,000 difference. In less than 20 years they had spent $45,000 of their own on their father's $50,000 statue.

Last week the marble, in spite of difficulties with the U. S. customs, was finally in Manhattan, cut, ready to be put in place. But at the last moment the stone cutters' union called a strike because the marble was cut in Italy, because it did not provide sufficient work for union members. Although the contractor last week admitted that he was hogtied again, he optimistically prophesied that the Pulitzer's Lady of the Plaza would not remain disreputable another winter.

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