85 Years Before 9-11 ... Manhattan Was Blasted in a Now Forgotten Act

[acmavm]

of Terrorism

http://hnn.us/articles/6213.html

By James Ottavio Castagnera
Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”

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Since September 11, 2001 -- when the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by Al-Qaida terrorists -- tourists have been barred from climbing to Lady Liberty’s crown. Since July 30, 1916, visitors to Liberty Island have been barred from climbing into the Lady’s torch. At about two o’clock on that Sunday morning, an explosion of such severity rocked adjacent Black Tom Island that Philadelphians felt the shock wave. The Statue of Liberty sustained 100,000 1916-dollars worth of damage from a shotgun-blast of shrapnel. One long-term result was the closing of her torch to tourist traffic, according to a U.S. Park Service Officer. “Another,” he adds, “was the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Black Tom Island, today comprising a portion of Liberty State Park’s south side, was connected to Jersey City by a long pier used by the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company and the National Dock and Storage Corporation as a munitions depot for trans-shipment to the allies on the Western Front. The night Black Tom blew, its warehouses held more than two million pounds (1000 tons) of TNT, gunpowder, dynamite, and shrapnel. One vessel, Johnson Barge Number 17, alone accounted for 100,000 pounds of TNT. As with the airliners high-jacked by Al-Qaida three years ago, the railroad and barges on and around Black Tom were poorly guarded. The U.S. was still formally “neutral” in 1916, albeit British control of the Atlantic shipping lanes insured that the allies were America’s main customers for our munitions production. Germany resolved to do something about that.

Accident or Act of Terror?

The park officer, who took this writer on a tour of Ellis Island recently, says the main blast damaged neighboring Ellis Island, where he leads tours, to the tune of $500,000 or “half the one million dollars it cost the government to build the facility.” In the immediate aftermath of the Black Tom disaster, spontaneous combustion was suspected. Guards spotted several small fires and ran for their lives. One watchman had the mental presence to pull the alarm that alerted the Jersey City Fire Department… but too late. The fires set off a series of shrapnel shells. As if part of a nuclear chain reaction, the small explosions culminated in a giant blast. And as if to record the blast for history, a chunk of metal hit the Jersey Journal’s clock tower, stopping it at exactly 2:12 a.m.

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Says my Ellis Island tour guide, "People have pretty much forgotten the Black Tom explosion. They don't know that, as bad as the Twin Towers tragedy was, it wasn't the first time terrorists attacked lower Manhattan."

He adds that to this day, Black Tom stands as one of the three worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the other two being the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Terry McNichol and the Nine-Eleven attacks.
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[auburngrad82]

1. There was another terrorist attack in NYC in the late 20s

Someone pulled a wagon full of dynamite in front of the stock exchange in 1928-1929 (can't remember exact date) a few minutes before noon. The wagon exploded at 11:50 killing several bystanders. It could have been much worse had the explosion happened a few minutes after noon when everyone left the building for lunch. I learned about this from the Ric Burns PBS series "New York". A great series about a great city.

[Chef]

2. Wall Street

September 16, 1920. Thirty-three dead. 400 wounded.