Pulitzer Hall

2950 Broadway | also 1100 Amsterdam Avenue | Morningside Heights | built 1912

Open on the map6 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1903

    August

    Joseph Pulitzer's offer to fund a journalism school finally wins Columbia's trustees

    Pulitzer had discussed a journalism school with Columbia's president Seth Low in the early 1890s, but the trustees rejected the idea. In 1903 he revived it with President Nicholas Murray Butler, and this time Columbia accepted. His longtime secretary, George W. Hosmer, wrote out a sixteen-page draft agreement that August and made the first approach to Butler. Not everyone cheered: Theodore Roosevelt wrote to an editor that he was indignant that Columbia took such money from such a knave. The negotiations were not completed until after Pulitzer's death in 1911.

    Source: exhibitions.library.columbia.edu

  2. 1912

    Columbia dedicates its School of Journalism with a Rodin bust of Pulitzer beside President Butler

    A 1912 photograph in Columbia's archives records the dedication of the School of Journalism, with President Nicholas Murray Butler standing beside a bust of Joseph Pulitzer by Auguste Rodin. Pulitzer's son Ralph, who ran the New York World after his father's death, addressed the students at Earl Hall that December. He urged them to treat newspaper work as a solemn trust, not a trade.

    Source: exhibitions.library.columbia.edu

  3. 1912

    September 30

    The first journalism classes begin with 79 students, a dozen of them women

    Classes opened on September 30, 1912, with 79 students and the veteran journalist Talcott Williams as director. Students were sent out around the city to cover a presidential visit by William Howard Taft, a police murder trial and a suffrage march. Another assignment sent a student from China undercover into a downtown cocaine den. The building at this address was finished the next year.

    Source: Wikipedia

  4. 1914

    A statue of Thomas Jefferson is unveiled outside the journalism building

    Columbia's 250th-anniversary timeline lists the statue under 1914, two years after the School of Journalism was founded with an endowment from Joseph Pulitzer. The figure of Thomas Jefferson stands between the journalism building and Furnald Hall. It matches a statue of Alexander Hamilton that stands between Hamilton and Hartley Halls.

    Source: c250.columbia.edu

  5. 1935

    Dean Carl Ackerman turns the school into the first graduate school of journalism in the U.S.

    Dean Carl Ackerman, a 1913 alumnus, led the school in 1935 as it became the first graduate school of journalism in the country. Later growth included coursework in television news and documentary film. The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, the oldest international journalism awards, were founded in 1938, and the school began publishing the Columbia Journalism Review in 1961.

    “In 1935, Dean Carl Ackerman, a 1913 alumnus, led the school's transition to become the first graduate school of journalism in the United States.”

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 2012

    April 20

    The journalism building is renamed Pulitzer Hall at the start of the school's centennial

    Columbia announced on March 7, 2012 that it would name the Journalism building Pulitzer Hall in honor of the school's founder, Joseph Pulitzer. A new facade was to be unveiled on April 20, 2012, which opened the school's centennial year. University President Lee C. Bollinger said the renaming let Columbia celebrate the school's heritage while recognizing its current scholarship and teaching.

    Source: poynter.org

Further reading

Nearby

All 49 buildings with stories in Morningside Heights