Postcard Thursday: The 1973 ITT Bombing

In the early morning hours of September 28, 1973, a bomb exploded at the ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph) Building at 437 Madison Avenue. A few minutes before the explosion, a caller who identified himself as a member of the Weather Underground phoned to warn the company of the bomb and to let them know it was a protest against ITT's role in the coup earlier that year in Chile.

No one was injured, though that was not normally the case with Weather Underground bombings. Since 1969, a series of robberies, bombings, and "National Actions" by the Weathermen, as they came to be known, had targeted what the members saw as corrupt government practices. In 1970 alone, there had been over 25 bombings or attempted attacks, many of them in New York City. Perhaps most famously, on March 6, 1970, the townhouse on West 11th Street that Weathermen were using as a bomb factory blew up, killing three of the bomb makers. (Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson would escape, becoming fugitives.)

That Greenwich Village explosion did not set the Weather Underground back; in fact, bombings increased. On June 9, 1970, the New York City Police Headquarters was bombed; on March 1, 1971, the Weathermen placed an explosive device in the US Capitol to protest US military action in Laos; on May 19, 1972 (Ho Chi Minh's birthday), the Pentagon was attacked -- and these were just the most high-profile cases.

ITT had been founded in 1920 after the purchase of telephone interests in Puerto Rico and Cuba. The company expanded greatly over the next fifty years, but continued to have a strong Latin and South American presence, including owning 70% of the Chilean telephone company. Alarmed at Salvador Allende's government (and likely facing the loss of the monopoly on Chilean communications), the company helped finance Pinochet's military coup. In retaliation, the Weather Underground bombed both 437 Madison (a 1967 skyscraper by Emory Roth and Sons) and ITT's headquarters in Rome, Italy.

You can read more about the bombing at https://nyti.ms/2fAPsJA.

By 1976, the Weather Underground had reorganized and most violent actions stopped, though Kathy Boudin -- who had fled the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion -- was part of the 1981 Brinks truck robbery at the Nanuet Mall near Nyack, New York in which two police officers and a security guard were murdered. Paroled in 2003, Boudin now teaches at Columbia University's School of Social Work.

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Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

The Bombing of Fraunces Tavern -- January 24, 1975

Thirty-five years ago this week, on January 24, 1975, a bomb blast ripped through the Fraunces Tavern annex, killing four people and injuring more than 50 others.

The bomb exploded at 1:25 p.m. -- just in the middle of the lunch rush -- destroying the entryway, windows, and interior staircase of the tavern's 19th-century annex at 101 Broad Street (the building to the right in the photo above). While diners at the tavern's main restaurant were shielded from the blast by the building's thick walls, patrons upstairs at the Anglers' Club of New York City were not so lucky.

That afternoon, police received a tip that the bomb had been the work of the F.A.L.N. (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional), a Puerto Rican nationalist group. Formed in the late 1960s, the F.A.L.N. had already claimed responsibility for two smaller operations, a series of bombs that had gone off in October 1969 (causing no injuries), and one in Harlem about a month before the Fraunces Tavern bombing that had injured a police officer, ultimately causing him to lose his eye.

The F.A.L.N. directed the police to a phone booth in the Financial District where they found a note explaining that the Fraunces Tavern bomb was a retaliation for "the CIA ordered bomb that murdered Angel Luis Chavonnier and Eddie Ramos, two innocent young workers who supoorted [sic] Puerto Rican independence" as well as the "maiming of ten innocent persons...in a Mayaguez, Puerto Rico dining place on Saturday the eleventh of January, 1975."


Until its dissolution in the early 1980s, the F.A.L.N. would remain one of the most destructive terrorist groups in America. Throughout the rest of the decade numerous bombs were placed -- mainly in New York and Chicago -- causing millions of dollars in damages and a few injuries. The next fatality did not occur until August 1977, when Charles Steinberg was killed at the Mobil Building on 42nd Street. The F.A.L.N's last bombing in New York was took place on December 31, 1982, when bombs were exploded at Federal Plaza, One Police Plaza, near Foley Square, and in Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn. Three NYPD officers were badly injured in the blasts.

The F.A.L.N. dissolved in 1983; no one was ever arrested or prosecuted for the Fraunces Tavern attack and no plaque or other commemoration adorns the building to memorialize the loss of life that day.

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Read more about Fraunces Tavern and its role in the American Revolution in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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