On this day in New York · June 25, 1906
Stanford White Is Shot Dead in His Own Rooftop Theater
The architect who gave Madison Square Garden its rooftop pleasure palace died there, shot three times by the jealous husband of a chorus girl he had once seduced.
The facts
- Date
- June 25, 1906
- Location
- Rooftop theater, Madison Square Garden, Manhattan
- The show
- Opening night of the revue Mam'zelle Champagne
- Outcome
- Second trial, 1908: not guilty by reason of insanity; committed to Matteawan State Hospital
On the night of June 25, 1906, the architect Stanford White sat watching the finale of the musical revue Mam'zelle Champagne in the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, the building he himself had designed. Harry Kendall Thaw, a wealthy and volatile Pittsburgh heir, walked up and fired three shots at White from about two feet away, killing him instantly in front of a stunned opening-night crowd. Thaw said he was avenging his wife, the actress and former artist's model Evelyn Nesbit, whom White had seduced years earlier when she was still a teenager. The killing set off two of the most obsessively covered murder trials in the city's history, and Thaw ended up in an asylum rather than a cell.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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I did it because he ruined my wife! He had it coming to him! He took advantage of the girl and then abandoned her!
Harry Thaw, shouted while standing over White's body moments after the shooting, per witness accounts
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The murder turned Gilded Age money, sex, and violence into front-page spectacle, giving New York its first modern Trial of the Century and a grim footnote to one of the era's grandest buildings.
Sources
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