The anarchist bombs that rocked 23 Wall Street were contained in a horse-drawn cart.

Long before the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 or the horrors of 9/11, Wall Street was devastated by anarchist bombs. In 1920, the home of JP Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, was the site of an explosion that left dozens dead and hundreds injured. No assailant was ever captured. An excerpt from a 2003 article by James Barron in the New York Times about the largely forgotten tragedy:

“The fortresslike facade of the Morgan building was pocked with craters that remain deep enough to sink a palm into. The columns of what is now Federal Hall, across the street, were blackened. More than 30 people were killed and several hundred wounded, and the damage exceeded $2 million — more than $18.4 million in 2003 dollars.

‘The number of victims, large though it was, cannot convey the extent of the inferno produced by the explosion, the worst of its kind in American history,’ Paul Avrich, a professor of history at Queens College, wrote in reviewing the case more than a decade ago.

The investigators sniffing for clues long ago went from being detectives to historians. The police never charged anyone in the bombing, and it is a mostly forgotten moment in New York City history.

‘Nobody remembers,’ said Beverly Gage, whose book The Wall Street Explosion: Capitalism, Terrorism and the 1920 Bombing of New York, is to be published next year by Oxford University Press.”