John William Warde
The son of a Long Island express agent, his 12-hour[2] dilemma before jumping held 300 New York City Police Department officers at bay.
[2] John William Warde worked as a bank clerk in Southampton until he survived a suicide attempt with a knife in July 1937 and spent three months in the Central Islip Psychiatric Center.
On Tuesday morning, July 26, 1938, after spending a long weekend in Chicago, Warde, his sister Katherine and two friends of the family surnamed Valentine checked in to room 1714 on the 17th floor of the Gotham Hotel in midtown Manhattan.
Their father, John A. Warde, was vacationing in Vermont, contacted by telephone there and told, many hours before his son jumped, about the suicidal gesture.
[2] Presner, aware that an apparently dehydrated Warde was repeatedly asking for and drinking water, hoped the successive very small doses of Benzedrine would alleviate his melancholia.
[2][5] Patrolman Glasco was a Woodhaven, Queens resident whose NYPD job was in the “First District Traffic Summons Squad,” as the New Yorker (magazine) reported many years later.
[2] At noon, Glasco was helping the NYPD sergeant who supervised him control the traffic jam that already had started outside the Gotham Hotel as a result of numerous pedestrians and motorists trying to look at whatever was going on.
[2] (Room 1714 was used regularly by a wealthy Southampton, Long Island family surnamed Valentine that had befriended Warde in 1937 following a suicide attempt he had made that year.
[8] Writer Joel Sayre wrote about the Warde suicide in The New Yorker in an article entitled "That Was New York: The Man on the Ledge", published on April 16, 1949.
[9] The Sayre article was adapted by Fox into the 1951 film Fourteen Hours, with Richard Basehart as the man on the ledge and Paul Douglas as the police officer who tries to talk him out of jumping.
The studio changed the title from The Man on the Ledge to Fourteen Hours at the request of Warde's mother, so that the picture would not be as closely identified with her son.
