A shrapnel bomb in a crowded New York neighborhood is not a new tactic
Almost 100 years ago, Wall Street’s lunch hour was the target
This morning, the suspect who detonated a bomb this Saturday in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan was arrested. The blast he set off injured at least 29 people, though fortunately, no one was killed.
There is no such thing as a good disaster, although the outcome of this event (no fatalities, swift apprehension) may leave something to appreciate, especially considering the history of bombings by radicals in New York City. With Saturday’s panic freshly in mind, it might be of help to remember an even more severe act of terrorism, one from nearly a century ago: The Wall Street bombing of 1920.
On September 16th of that year, a man parked a horse-drawn carriage outside the offices of J.P. Morgan & Co. near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets. Then he walked away, never to be heard from again.
The carriage—rigged with dynamite and pieces of iron scrap—exploded at 12:01pm, just as the lunch rush began. Immediately, the blast killed 30 people, and injured some 300 more. The abundance of iron shrapnel meant the bomb was especially harmful, shattering glass and striking victims, leaving them with painful lacerations and burns. Over the following two days, more would succumb to their injuries, putting the final death toll at 38 people.
Contemporary accounts testify to the carnage of the bombing. Witnesses described seeing men cut in half by enormous shards of plate glass. A woman’s head was found stuck to the edge of a concrete building, with its hat still on. The explosion was even so powerful that a rider in a trolley two blocks away told the Times how his car was knocked off the tracks.
A 22-year-old stenographer named Ella Perry described the scene in her office the moment the device went off. Glass and ceiling plaster fell down everywhere, while outside it was even worse. Some of the victims “had their faces almost completely blown off and their clothing had either been blown from their bodies or burned off,” she said. “The police threw sheets over the bodies as fast as they could get them.”
In an effort to identify the explosive material, investigators tested the oily film found on many of the iron fragments. This turned out to be but a dead end, and a grotesque one at that. These “oily and discolored smears and general coating,” wrote one newspaper, “seemed to be from the dead horse.”
Crowds flocked to the scene as a spectacle. “Wall Street Workers Having Difficulty Getting Throngs,” read one headline. It was big publicity, but the investigation surrounding the 1920 Wall Street bombing was no success.
In an error of damage control, clean up crews went right to work on the streets, even before knowing the reality of the situation. Thanks to their swift efforts, the area was cleared for people to go to work the next day, but in turn workers disposed of many components of the actual bomb, hindering the investigation.
Over the coming three years, officials made dozens of arrests, but no one was formally charged with the crime. When the FBI revisited the investigation in 1944, they concluded it was likely a plot by Italian anarchists, the sort who were behind many of radical acts of terrorism in the early twentieth century, including the assassination of President McKinley and other attempts on the lives of robber barons like Henry Frick.
Historians prefer to assign culpability to Italian anarchist Mario Buda. Buda was entrenched in the community of Italian radicals, and was experienced in the crafting of explosives, having helped construct one used in Milwaukee in 1917 which killed nine police officers. Scholars suspect Buda was angered by the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were arrested a week before the Wall Street attack. Buda, who is said to have admitted to carrying out the assault later in life, was never captured, and escaped to Italy where he died at an advanced age.
We may have largely forgotten this deadly event, and its implicit lesson to keep calm amid tragedy, but it remains with us today in subtle ways. A stroll past 23 Wall Street, for instance, will reveal pockmarks in the facade—made by iron shrapnel sent flying from the bomb nearly a century ago.
