May 4, 2012
NoMad New York in Assassination Vacation
NoMad New York is featured in Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation…
Edwin (John Wilkes Booth’s brother) would have loved his statue in Gramercy Park—the first statue of an actor in the city. He warranted a stained-glass window too—a multicolored Shakespearean portrait in the Church of the Transfiguration on Twenty‑ninth. Known as the Little Church Around the Corner, it became an actors’ church in the nineteenth century because it was the one church in town where actors would be granted a proper funeral.
The church hosted Edwin’s funeral on June 9, 1893. Just as his pallbearers were carrying his coffin out the door in New York, in Washington, three floors of Ford’s Theatre collapsed. The building had been turned into a government office building after the Lincoln assassination. Twenty-two federal employees died.