The Wall Street Bombing

Look closely at the stone facade of the building on your left, and you can still make out small pockmarks scarred into the surface, left by one of the deadliest attacks in American history before the modern era.

Just after noon on September sixteenth, nineteen twenty, a horse drawn wagon stopped outside twenty three Wall Street, directly across from the headquarters of J P Morgan and Company, then the most powerful bank in the country. Inside the wagon was roughly one hundred pounds of dynamite packed with five hundred pounds of heavy cast iron window weights, rigged to a timer. The explosion tore through the lunchtime crowd of clerks, messengers, and bankers filling the street. Thirty eight people were killed, many of them within seconds, and well over a hundred more were seriously injured. It remains one of the deadliest acts of terrorism ever committed on American soil.

Investigators worked the case for years. They suspected a group of Italian anarchists known as Galleanists, tied to a string of bombings the year before, and some historians believe a man named Mario Buda built the device and fled the country soon after. But no one was ever arrested or charged, and the bombing was never officially solved.

The bank itself absorbed much of the blast. Shrapnel tore through the building's windows and interior, but the exterior stonework suffered only scattered pockmarks, small divots where flying metal struck the facade. Rather than repair them, J P Morgan and Company left the scars on the stone as they were, in defiance of whoever was responsible. More than four decades later, the New York Times called those marks a badge of honor. They are still there today, a quiet reminder of a lunch hour that ended in sudden violence and a mystery no one ever solved.