WTC and 23 Wall Street

Nearly a century ago, on September 6, 1920, a bomb exploded across the street from JP Morgan headquarters at 23 Wall Street, killing 38 and injuring more that 400.  The resulting investigation focused on Galleanist anarchists which law enforcement had tied to the 1919 bombings and to Sacco and Vanzetti.

The Wall Street Journal's Gordon Crovitz reports on the 1920 bombing and the Symbols of 9/11:

"Wall Street reacted by getting back to business as quickly as possible. A Wall Street Journal editorial the day after the blast said it "killed an uncertain number of absolutely innocent and uninterested people," sending "a sufficient number of injured to the neighboring hospitals to make it a total record of casualties about equaling a raid in France in No Man's Land during the late war. And that is all it did." The editorial added, 'The relations between capital and labor will not be changed, not even for the worse as regards labor; for no one but a fool has ever doubted Wall Street's courage.' "

"But as with today's Islamists, the anarchist threat was real. Anarchists had bombed and killed many at Chicago's Haymarket Square and the Los Angeles Times building, and had tried to mail bombs to 30 people, including J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the mayor and police commissioner of New York City. Anarchists had assassinated President William McKinley, a Russian czar, a French president, a Spanish prime minister and the king of Italy.

"The memorial to the earlier attack on Wall Street is unusual: damage left unrepaired. The bomb, made up of dynamite and hundreds of cast-iron slugs, went off across the street from the headquarters of J.P. Morgan, then the world's leading bank. It left deep pockmarks in its marble outer walls, which the partners left as an act of defiance."