Suicide Secrets of the Stevens Hotel

Built by 1927 and opening the same year the grand Stevens Hotel was once the famous place for society folks and the famous Versailles ballroom with Italian style columns and golden leaf trimmings was a majorly swanky place for them to.....do whatever it is that society people did back in those days after the Stock Market crash of 1929. Since 1951, the Stevens has been the Hilton and still is one posh place to stay in nowadays.

This was a hotel that, apparently, once housed such great guests as Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, Marshal Balbo and other kings, queens and assorted aristocrats. Yea, yea, yea, all of that is pretty boring once you can consider all the Chicago Tribune newspaper reports of people commiting such ghastly things as murder, robbery and suicide. Starting in 1932, there was a young lady named Ethel Salhanick who killed herself because the object of her affection, some nerdy looking dude named David Mandelbaum, didn't love her back. Looking at their pictures, Ethel was a beautiful young lady who could have saved herself for someone much better looking than geeky David, who happened to be a student at Northwestern. Then in 1936 there was a man from NYC named Edwin Eder who also leaped to his death for seemingly unknown reasons other than he had suffered a nervous breakdown some time before that. Interesting thing of note was that Mr. Eder was the brother of Guy Ederheimer who owned a string of successful women's clothing stores in the Chicago area at the time under the name Leschin Inc. Could the fact that he didn't have his own apparel store chain play a role in being depressed? I smell an Everybody Loves Raymond type of feud with a 1930's style twist. Then there was Mrs. Helen B Martin, a Rogers Park housewife who in 1937 also made the plunge. She was declared insane and her husband was out of town on business when the unfortunate incident occured. I hate that this was all the newspaper made her out to be, a lonely housewife. Shows the sexism of the times when her only role was that of a wife. What about her character? Also in 1937, 27 year old Miss Flossie A Castor leaped to her giant death after her uncle said that it had to be because she was being worked to death as the bookkeeper of a grocery store. It doesn't mention which store, but my money is on the fact that maybe she killed herself because she had to go through life with the first name Flossie and the last name Castor. Oh, come on, don't tell me no one was ever cruel on an easy mark like that. Lastly, in 1947 there was another single young woman by the name of Florence A Bear who took her last breath by jumping off. She suffered from some undisclosed illness that caused her to become distraught over a prognosis that wasn't getting better.

And suicides weren't the only popular stories. There was also the tale of two robbers who in 1945 stole loot and then argued over how to divide it up. That ended with one of them, Donald Jay Cook, killing the other, Morton Stein, and of course, ending up with all the cash until he was arrested. No tales of Amelia or Babe eating in the dining room can make up for all this juicy, serious stuff. Maybe, if Ms Earhart had leaped to her death in the hotel or disappeared there instead of in the Pacific then I would be more interested in the tales of the famous versus the tales of the everyday people.