Stanford White

Stanford White was a partner in McKim, Mead and White, the leading architects of New York's Gilded Age, and designed mansions, clubs, churches and the second Madison Square Garden. In 1889, for the hundredth anniversary of George Washington's inauguration, he built a temporary arch of plaster and wood over Fifth Avenue; New Yorkers loved it so much that they paid for a permanent one in marble, finished in 1892.

In June 1906 he was shot dead at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, his own building, by Harry Thaw, the jealous husband of Evelyn Nesbit, and the trial was called the trial of the century. Thaw was arraigned in the Jefferson Market Courthouse, now the library on our Village walk. The walk starts under his arch in Washington Square; stand by the fountain, which lines up with the arch and Fifth Avenue, for the classic view.