The Authors and Crimes of Gilded Age New York

Life is often stranger than art and the story of Stanford White and his murder in 1906 seems to belong more to fiction than to fact. Five years before his death, White, the architect who had designed so many of New York’s landmark buildings, had raped a sixteen-year-old chorus girl, Evelyn Nesbit. Nesbit later married Harry Thaw, a millionaire playboy, and on June 25, 1906, as White sat watching a performance of Mamzelle Champagne in Madison Square Garden, a vengeful Thaw fired three shots, instantly killing White.
New York in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era was a less expansive city and most literate New Yorkers lived and worked in the center of Manhattan, an area no larger than four square miles. This area encompassed Madison Square, Gramercy Park, Greenwich Village to the south and Broadway as far north as Times Square. The wealthy, the Vanderbilts, the Astors and their ilk lived in grand mansions that lined Fifth Avenue as far as 40th Street. Few New Yorkers ventured either to the west side or to the east side of Manhattan without a compelling reason; the docks on both the Hudson River and the East River were dangerous slums inhabited by a transient population and numerous gangs. The events in The Girl on the Velvet Swing all occurred in this central district: the rape of Evelyn Nesbit and the murder of White occurred near Madison Square; Evelyn is a chorus girl in the musical Florodora at the Casino Theatre on Broadway; and Harry Thaw is first arraigned at the Jefferson Market Courthouse in Greenwich Village.

Henry James, Washington Square (1880)

Many novelists and playwrights have made New York their home over the years and the overwhelming majority have chosen to live in Manhattan. No other place in the United States at the time of the murder of Stanford White contained such a concentration of literary talent as those districts near to Madison Square. Here then is a selection of seven writers who were all contemporaries of Stanford White and Harry Thaw and who wrote, to one degree or another, about life in the city: [Henry James, Washington Square; Stepen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament”; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; William Sidney Porter [O. Henry], The Four Million; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man] ... [mehr] http://crimereads.com/the-authors-and-crimes-of-gilded-age-new-york/