To be a great hotel is to host fabulous lives but also, sometimes, spectacular deaths. One of these took place on July 26, 1938, when a young man from Long Island named John William Warde climbed out of a 17th-story window of what was then called the Gotham Hotel, in midtown Manhattan, near the southern border of Central Park. He spent the next 11 hours on the 18-inch ledge. “As if it were the afternoon of the crucial game of a World Series, people all over New York gathered around the radios of parked cars” to learn of whether the troubled young man would jump, according to Joel Sayre’s account in The New Yorker, “The Man on the Ledge.” On the evening of February 3, 2010, Gigi B. Jordan checked into the same hotel, which was now called the Peninsula. She asked for a suite: $2,500 a night. She paid in cash.
-Newsweek
