Big Bang on Wall Street
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Thursday, September 16, 1920, was clear and mild. Between 11:30 and 11:58 a.m., five crudely printed circulars were deposited in a mailbox at Cedar Street and Broadway in the financial district. They read: “Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you. American Anarchists Fighters.” Around 11:55 a.m., an old wagon, drawn by a dark bay mare, halted near 23 Wall Street, the offices of J.P. Morgan & Company. Trinity Church’s clock struck noon. Sidewalks filled with brokers, clerks, and receptionists heading for lunch.
On the wagon’s floor were 500 pounds of fragmented lead sash weights piled around a bomb of roughly 100 pounds of TNT. At 12:01, the device exploded, hurling the fragments into the crowds like shrapnel. Automobiles flipped into the air. J.P. Morgan’s windows burst inward in blizzards of razor-sharp shards, instantly killing the bank’s chief clerk. The Stock Exchange’s huge windows collapsed to the trading floor.
Thirty died instantly and of 200 wounded, 10 later died. Terrified mobs trampled the victims. A messenger lay headless. An eyeless clerk, feet blown off, tried to crawl. A woman’s head, still wearing a hat, stuck to J.P. Morgan’s facade. Horse and wagon had been shredded, leaving a hoof, canvas scraps; an axle and hubcap; wheel spokes; nuts and bolts. But the remains permitted the NYPD to create detailed descriptions of mare, harness, and wagon, including: “SHOES – Hind shoes marked JHU and NOA, about half an inch apart.”
They had been made by a foreign trained farrier. The initials were a union label. Police narrowed their search to immigrant union blacksmiths. Dominick De Grazia of 205 Elizabeth Street, recognizing the shoes, made an identical pair for the police, who reported that “a defect in the anvil (affected) the top plates of both the sample shoes and those worn by the dead horse.”
De Grazia said a man driving a horse and a wagon matching police descriptions had asked him to tighten a rear shoe. Noticing a crack in the hoof, the smith had suggested, made, and affixed new shoes. He later found the crack when shown the hoof found on Wall Street. He said the driver spoke with a Sicilian accent, was 25 to 30 years old, perhaps 5 feet, 5 inches tall, and weighed about 165 pounds, with black hair and mustache. But other eyewitnesses described the driver as an “East Side peddler” type, and some saw two or three drivers.
The NYPD visited every American sash-weight manufacturer and dealer to find the source of the shrapnel; nearly 5,000 stables to track the horse; and hundreds of wagon manufacturers to identify the wagon. Detectives visited every garage in the region to check the movements of all vehicles on September 16.
After reconstructing some twisted bits of tin into two five-gallon containers from Brooklyn’s Atlas Can Company, they searched company records and questioned all its customers, finding nothing. A small iron ball had struck a city street cleaner four blocks from the explosion. The NYPD identified it as a knob from a military field safe manufactured in Cincinnati. Detectives tracked the safe to the Army barracks at Jeffersonville, Ind., and then to Omaha, New Orleans, Washington, France, and Hoboken. There the trail ran out: The Army hadn’t recorded the safe’s disposition, whether sold to a junk dealer or simply dumped.
Edwin P. Fischer, championship tennis player and occasional psychiatric inpatient, described as a “harmless, likeable chap” when not demented by bipolar disorder, had told a tennis club caretaker some two weeks before the explosion that either “We” or “They” were blowing up Wall Street. He predicted a September 16 Wall Street explosion to a stranger on a Hudson Tube train. Between September 11 and 13, he mailed postcards from Toronto advising friends and acquaintances to get out of Wall Street after Wednesday trading closed at 3 p.m.
At the request of relatives, who feared Fischer was having a breakdown, Canadian authorities committed him to an asylum. Fischer then voluntarily returned to New York, arriving at Grand Central wearing two business suits for warmth and tennis whites beneath in case he had a chance for a game. He told District Attorney Edward Swann the messages had come “out of the air from God.” Fischer was discharged to a private sanitarium, his warnings deemed mere coincidences.
The lawmen fruitlessly interrogated numerous suspects, including Romanian radical Florean Zelenska, who had worked for a gunpowder company. Though anarchist Pietro Angelo, suspected in an April 1919 mail-bomb plot, had a perfect alibi, the feds deported him to Italy as an undesirable alien. There he bombed an opera house, killing 39.
The NYPD gave up around 1940. The fist-sized pits gouged by the explosion in 23 Wall Street’s north facade remain.