The pitted stone on the Wall Street front of 23 Wall Street was made at one minute past noon on 16 September 1920. A horse-drawn wagon standing across from J.P. Morgan and Company exploded, carrying about a hundred pounds of dynamite and five hundred pounds of cast-iron sash weights. Thirty-eight people died, most of them young messengers, clerks and stenographers on their lunch hour, and well over a hundred were seriously hurt. Damage ran past two million dollars. The firm chose not to repair the marble, and the gouges, some the size of a baseball, are still there. Leaflets found in a nearby mailbox, signed American Anarchist Fighters, demanded the release of political prisoners. The Bureau of Investigation and the city police worked the case for more than three years and never charged anyone; historians, following Paul Avrich, point to the Italian anarchist Mario Buda, who was back in Italy by November.
The Stock Exchange suspended trading within a minute and reopened the next morning, after crews had cleaned the street overnight and destroyed much of the evidence. Among those who helped that day was James Saul, a seventeen-year-old messenger who took over a parked car and drove the injured to hospital. The building, finished in 1914 in pink Tennessee marble and known on the Street as the Corner, became one of Manhattan's first designated landmarks in 1965.
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40.7068, -74.0103
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