1900's Media | The Murder of Stanford White

The Murder of the Century.

On 25 June 1906 world-famous architect Stanford White, forty-seven, took in a show at the rooftop café of Madison Square Garden, a complex he had designed. Harry Thaw, heir to a Pittsburgh railroad fortune, killed him with three shots from a pistol. Thaw's beautiful young wife, the model and actress Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, had carried on an affair with White and had told her husband that the architect had raped her when she was a virgin of sixteen.

A Morality Tale.

The incident provided sensational fodder for New York's fifteen newspapers. William Randolph Hearst's Evening Journal pin pointed what the case seemed to reveal about the city's rich: "The flash of that pistol lighted up an abyss of moral turpitude, revealing powerful, reckless, openly flaunted wealth." The circulation of Joseph Pulitzer's World jumped one hundred thousand the first week after the murder. Photographs...