Who was Evelyn Nesbit?
Evelyn Nesbit was a show girl and the former mistress of architect Stanford White. Stanford White was the “White” in the firm of McKim, Mead and White; among other buildings, he was responsible for the old Penn Station and the second Madison Square Garden. White died when Harry Thaw, Nesbit’s husband, shot him in the face on the roof of White’s Madison Square Garden. • A wiki is a user-editable website. Where did the name “wiki” come from? It’s allegedly Hawaiian for “quick”.
Evelyn Nesbit, sometimes called the world’s first supermodel, was a chorus girl and artist’s model in turn-of-the-century New York City who became caught up in one of the era’s most infamous murder cases. The crime, in which Nesbit’s husband, Harry Kendall Thaw, shot her former lover, millionaire Stanford White, in public, added notoriety to Nesbit’s beauty. Evelyn Nesbit starred in a few silent films and was supposedly immortalized in Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl” illustrations, but nothing would ever gain her as much fame as her role in the Stanford White murder case. Born on Christmas day in 1884, Evelyn Nesbit had a difficult childhood, as her father died when she was eight years old, leaving the family in poverty. When Evelyn Nesbit reached adolescence, she began to support her mother and younger brother by working as an artist’s model. She moved to New York City with her mother at the age of 16 and secured more prestigious modeling jobs and work on Broadway as a chorus girl
