HARRY THAW’S RETURN.

Shannon News, 31 July 1925, Page 3

HARRY THAW’S RETURN.

“NEW YORK IS ROTTEN.” AFTER TWENTY YEARS. Harry Kendall Thaw returned to the bright lights of Broadway last week, after 20 years—a modern Rip Van Winkle. Thaw found a jdifferent Broadway than in the days when he, one of its best-known habitues, wooed and won Evelyn Nesbit, the dancing-girl —Evelyn Nesbit for whose love .he quarrelled with Stanford White, the architect, and shot him to death under the soft lights of the Madison Square roof garden. Twenty years of fleeing before the law, walking with a guard in the grou'nds of insane asylums—then Thaw came back. He found the old Broadway dead, his friends dead or vanished, the bright lights too bright, the old haunts all gone. Even Madison Square Garden, the scene of his tragedy, crumbling under the hammers of labourers, was being .torn down to make way for a modern structure.

The girls shun him. There are only a few—they ooukl be conn led ion the fingers of' one hand—who are even friendly with him. His former wife, now dancing in her own cabaret in Atlantic City, was mentioned. Thaw laughed mirthlessly. Thaw visited some of the night clubs. The jazz bands, the slang of the girls—all of it made him irritable. His visit to Broadway lasted two nights. Then he left. “New York,” he said, “is rotten. I don’t understand it. It isn’t the place I used to know. I don’t understand the girls. Twenty years—what a change.”