Police investigate the scene of the Fraunces Tavern
bombing in 1975. Image via latinamericanstudies.org.
The New York area has scene multiple bombings over the years, the most recent occurring in Times Square Thursday morning. Not including the two World Trade Center attacks, the incidents include:
July 30, 1916 - The Black Tom explosion.
Hundreds were injured, and possibly seven people killed, when barges and railroad cars filled with munitions bound for England and France were exploded by saboteurs on Black Tom Island, west of Ellis Island. The attack was carried out by U.S.-based German officials and their agents to stop the munitions from reaching French and British troops in World War I.
Sept. 16, 1920 - Terrorist attack on Wall Street.
A horse-drawn wagon filled with TNT exploded down the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Thirty-nine people were killed and another 300 were injured and burned. No one was ever charged for the attack, but police suspected Italian anarchists or Communists.
1940-1956- The Mad Bomber.
A disgruntled former employee of Con Ed named George P. Metesky planted 33 homemade bombs around the city, and became known as “The Mad Bomber.” Only 23 of the bombs actually went off before being found. The explosions injured a total of 15 people. He was arrested on Jan. 18 1957 and was released in 1974.
March 6, 1970 - Weather Underground blast.
Theodore Gold, a Columbia student and Cathlyn Wilkerson were building bombs in Wilkerson's family's townhouse in Greenwich Village. Some of the explosives went off accidentally, killing three people and demolishing the entire townhouse. Wilkerson was a member of the radical organization “Weather Underground” but never said what the group was planning to do with the bombs.
1970s and 80s – Puerto Rican liberation group, FALN (or Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional) commits violent attacks all over the city.
In 1975, they set off a bomb that killed four people at Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street. The group claimed responsibility, but no one was ever prosecuted. It also planted pipe bombs in several big corporations and the New York Public Library and set fires in La Guardia, Kennedy, and Newark airports. In 1982 they bombed the NYPD headquarters and many financial houses on Wall Street. In the end, they were blamed for more than 50 bomb attacks in the New York area that killed six people and maimed or injured dozens more.
-- Laura Berger