January 7, 1872: Jim Fisk dies, a day after being shot at the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway in Lower Manhattan. He was 36 years old. It was one of the most spectacular crimes of the Gilded Age.
James Fisk Jr. (no middle name) was born on April 1, 1835 in Pownal, Vermont, about 40 miles northeast of Albany, New York. He got rich through selling dry goods to the U.S. Army during the American Civil War, and became known as Big Jim for both his physical and his financial size. He was also nicknamed Diamond Jim well before Jim Brady came along.
He became a stockbroker, and he and Jay Gould gained control of the New York and Erie Railroad. They expanded their fortunes through an alliance with New York's political czar, William "Boss" Tweed, their attempt to corner the gold market, with the assistance of Abel Corbin, husband of President Ulysses S. Grant's sister Virginia, led to the stock market Panic of 1869. Fisk and Gould emerged with their fortunes intact, but it smeared Grant's previously pristine reputation.
Fisk paid his employees well, but pretty much everybody else who knew who he was hated him. He lived long enough after being shot to identify his murderer as Ned Stokes, a business associate, who surely knew all of Fisk's secrets.
But it wasn't over money, or ethics. It was personal. It seems they also shared a mistress, the socialite Josie Mansfield. Stokes claimed self-defense, was sentenced to 6 years in prison, and served 4. He died in 1901. Mansfield fled the country due to the scandal, spent the rest of her days in Paris, and died in 1931.
The Grand Central Hotel was at 673 Broadway, at 3rd Street in Greenwich Village. It opened in 1870, and was advertised as the largest hotel in America. Baseball's National League was founded there in 1876.
By August 3, 1973, it was a welfare hotel. On that date, part of the building collapsed, killing 4 people. New York University built a dormitory on the site. A plaque honoring the NL's founding is on the Broadway side.
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January 7, 1872 was a Sunday. Baseball and football were out of season. Hockey was not yet organized. And basketball wouldn't be invented for almost 20 years. So there were no scores on this historic day.
