Finance History | 23 Wall Street, 16 September 1920 — The Scars Were Left in the Stone

People walk past 23 Wall Street and read the pockmarks as weather.

They are not weather. They are the remaining public record of the blast at noon on 16 September 1920.

A horse-drawn wagon packed with explosives and iron sash weights detonated at the Wall and Broad corner, outside J.P. Morgan and Co. and across from the New York Stock Exchange.

Thirty people were killed at once. Eight more died of wounds. Hundreds were injured. The New York Stock Exchange closed for the rest of the day.

Inside the Morgan building, chief clerk William Joyce was among the dead. Junius Spencer Morgan Jr., a son of J.P. Morgan Jr., was wounded. The senior partners who were the supposed political target were not.

The limestone facade designed by Trowbridge and Livingston, opened only six years earlier, took the iron. The firm left the pits in the stone. No plaque was set into the wall.

The crime was never solved. Period investigators pursued anarchist leads after earlier mail bombs that year; no conviction followed. The building kept the scars as the only marker on the street.

This memory is not the 1873 Drexel opening on the same plot, and it is not the 1907 lock-in at the Morgan Library uptown. It is the noon hour when a private partnership hall became an unsolved public wound, and when the house chose not to patch the stone.

The present JPMorgan Chase tower at 270 Park Avenue is not this corner. The corner still carries the 1920 surface.

Photo: street facade of 23 Wall Street, via Wikimedia Commons.