When Dynamite Turned Terrorism Into an Everyday Threat (2024)

July 4, 1914. 9:16 a.m. The first indication that something had gone terribly wrong on the upper floors of 1626 Lexington Avenue arrived in the form of a deafening sound wave. The Times would later compare it to “a broadside from a battleship.” Seconds after the boom, East Harlem pedestrians were shielding themselves from fragments of brick and cement and glass raining down from above. A quick glance upward revealed that the top three floors of 1626 Lexington had been demolished by some sort of blast.

The explosion shattered hundreds of windows in nearby buildings, and furniture from the top-floor apartments shot out across the roofline. As screams from the partly collapsed six-story structure began to rise, the pedestrians on the sidewalk realized that the debris raining down on them was not merely fragments of the ruined tenement building. They were also being bombarded by human remains. When the dust cloud from the blast cleared, a horrifying sight appeared in the carnage of the upper floors: the lifeless body of a man dangling from the fire escape, his legs twisted at a grotesque angle, the back of his skull blown out.

“The bomb was of the most powerful construction ever employed in the perpetration of an outrage of this kind in this city,” Eagan told the assembled reporters after a thorough examination of the crime scene. “I cannot understand why there was not even a greater loss of life.” But if the destructive power of the explosive was unusual, the fact that civilians were tinkering with dynamite in an apartment building was hardly anomalous at that moment in the city’s history. Eagan spent a quarter-century on the force, until his death in 1920; over that period, he was called on to either dismantle or survey the wreckage from something on the order of 7,000 bombs, or “infernal machines,” as the press came to call them.

The bombs came in all kinds of packages. Often they arrived in tin cans, emptied of the olive oil or soap or preserves they were manufactured to contain, now wedged tight with sticks of dynamite. Sometimes they were wrapped with an outer band of iron slugs, designed to maximize the destruction; conveyed to their target location in a satchel or suitcase; “accidentally” left behind in the courthouse, or the train station, or the cathedral. And sometimes the bomb was just a naked stick of dynamite with a fuse simple enough to be lit with the strike of a match, ready to be flung into an unsuspecting crowd.