The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
The World Cornerstone Box
This copper cornerstone box, inscribed "Pulitzer Building, October 10th, 1889," was placed in the building's foundations during an elaborate ceremony that marked the start of construction. Deposited inside were items that included parchment proclamations, photographs, and a complete set of more than twenty architectural drawings by the office of George B. Post. The crisply folded drawings, printed on paper, survived entombed in good condition until the World Building was demolished in 1955. Five of those drawings have been photographed and reproduced for this exhibition, including the magnificent elevation on the front of this case and the sections of the basements and lower stories shown folded here.
On loan from the World Papers, Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Gift of Joseph Pulitzer, Jr.
