John William Warde was a twenty-six-year-old native of Southampton, New York who committed suicide on July 26, 1938. He leaped from a window ledge of the seventeenth floor of the Gotham Hotel at 5th Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan. The son of a Long Island express agent, his eleven-hour dilemma before jumping held three hundred New York City Police Department officers at bay.

John William Warde was a twenty-six-year-old native of Southampton, New York who committed suicide on July 26, 1938. He leaped from a window ledge of the seventeenth floor of the Gotham Hotel at 5th Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan. The son of a Long Island express agent, his eleven-hour dilemma before jumping held three hundred New York City Police Department officers at bay.