Urbanite

Roughly 600 shirts dangled from the ceiling at Eugenio Maria De Hostos Community College today. They were speckled with paint and held together by wooden clips, thin strings and lots of hope. Every one of them told a story.

“Too many things have happened to me like being abused by the beast, a.k.a. my father,” read a beige T-shirt that bore the initials “S.S.” “Why it got to be me? I never did anything to nobody.”

It was part of the 12th annual Bronx Clothesline Project in honor of National Crime Victims Rights’ Week, which brought together those who have lost family members and friends to homicides, assaults and physical or emotional abuse.

Representatives of the Bronx District attorney’s office and Bronx nonprofit organizations gathered in an effort to inform New York City residents about the importance of coming forth when one is a victim of violence. Brittany Ramirez, a second-year student at Hostos, said that there’s a lot of violence in the Bronx and programs like The Bronx Clothesline Project empower people.

We can only assume this bizarre crime was triggerd by the grief these four Yonkers teens are feeling over the untimely death of Herb Peterson, inventor of the Egg McMuffin.

Or maybe they really want McD's to comply with new public calorie count rules?

Anyway, here's what happened: Two of the fast food offenders were from Yonkers, one comes from Brooklyn and one from the Bronx. The hoodlum quartet was arrested after they videotaped an assault and robbery on employees of a local McDonalds, said Yonkers police.

One of them danced behind the counter in his undies while the rest beat up the burger staff and stole one employee's wallet.

Needless to say, the golden arches staffers weren't lovin' it.

-- Lauren Johnston

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