The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

by Simon Baatz

The American bourgeoisie at the turn of the century held aristocratic traditions and styles in high regard.

But Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting the Mona Lisa, the jewel of the Louvre’s collection, was a disappointment. Evelyn recognized the enigmatic expression of the subject, the faint smile of the woman in the portrait, but there was otherwise nothing noteworthy about the work. It was a mystery, she decided, that this painting had attained its status as a masterpiece.

There was tremendous demand for the metal on account of the mania for electrification; electricity was the future, and copper was necessary for its success. Steel would also be a good investment:

if I had any money to invest I would put it all in steels and coppers, especially the copper.”

“He exhibited delusions of an exaggerated ego,” Evans testified. “He felt himself of exaggerated importance and was subjected to persecution by numerous persons.

He was a man who made friends easily, and he secured the support of the Democratic machine,

He seemed always alone, invariably standing apart from the other children at playtime, refusing any invitation to join their games.

a heartbreaking picture of a lonely child, morose and withdrawn, a boy who made no friends while attending the school.

he seemed irrational, mumbling to himself, moving jerkily and awkwardly, sitting motionless for long periods, staring into space.

The Hotel McAlpin, then the largest hotel in North America, with more than one thousand rooms, had been designed to impress, and it did not disappoint. The enormous lobby, constructed with violet-rose Breche marble from Italy and pale-yellow Caen limestone from France, soared three stories and included murals around the walls by Thomas Gilbert White. The McAlpin, the only hotel in New York with a telephone in every room, boasted a ballroom, several restaurants, a Chinese tearoom, a Turkish bath, a grillroom with terra-cotta murals, and a hospital with its own surgical and medical staff. It was more modern than the Knickerbocker, more opulent than the St. Regis, more profitable than the Plaza, and more fashionable than the Waldorf. In short, the Hotel McAlpin could claim to be among the leading hotels in the city.

Every life is a daily series of advances and retreats, intimate victories and private defeats, all measured not by grand events but by an awareness of the obstacles that have been overcome along the way.

Two newspapers, Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, dominated New York City at the turn of the century.

Leland Roth produced a magnificent account of the architectural work of McKim, Mead & White. The scope of the firm’s work has never been so exhaustively detailed nor so carefully analyzed,

Knowledge, Culture, and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817–2017