The War Brought Home: The Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion of 1970

By Brendan Mahoney

Figure One: A photo of the Greenwich Village Townhouse after the fires had been put out. [1]

The photo above shows three conjoined, yet distinct buildings in a row. Two are unscathed, and while the center building looks like it was the victim of a fire or an explosion — it was. In the otherwise ornate and tranquil neighborhood of Greenwich Village, an explosion in March of 1970 on 18 West 11th Street rocked the surrounding area. While this explosion was an accident, it still served some of the goals of the Weather Underground, who sought to destroy symbols of spoils and riches perpetrated by American capitalists, to draw attention to the chaos and suffering abroad in Vietnam, effectively bringing the war home. 

To understand this explosion, and how/why the Weathermen even formed, it is best to look back about half a year, to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) National Convention in the Fall of 1969. Amidst the passionate and even violent discourse of the 1969 SDS National Convention, the hazy slogan, “bring the war home!” rung out across the streets of Chicago. [2] At this convention there would be a splintering of the larger anti-war group, into smaller factions with more specified goals. The Weather Underground (Weathermen) rose from the dust as the pallbearers of the now deceased SDS and dying anti-war movement. This group sought to destroy many of the white, bourgeois remnants of the SDS, abandoning electoral and peaceful tactics in favor of guerrilla warfare, with solidarity across racial lines. Their motivation was to bring the war home. In plain terms that meant bringing the destruction and chaos that the US war machine had brought to the people in Vietnam and elsewhere, into the United States.

Theodore (Ted) Gold, a member of this new Weathermen group, following the Convention said, “we’ve got to turn New York into Saigon.” [3] Ted Gold wanted to bring the war that was ravaging a city abroad, ignored by the average American to a city that represented greed and wealth, so close to home that Americans could not ignore it. This transition that Gold wanted, would ultimately cost him his life on March 6th, 1970, when bombs that he and other members of the Weather Underground were building, exploded prematurely at their Greenwich Village townhouse. [4] Ultimately, in a perverse and curious way, Gold got his wish. But what about New York City represented a home that needed war and chaos?

While there are obvious reasons that New York City reflected a ‘home’ for the US, at least in the modern post-9/11 world, it is rather the more specific reasons that leaders of the Weathermen cited that take on historiographic importance here. In the immediate aftermath of the Convention, Michael Kazin, a now prolific historian on twentieth century US history, wrote an immediate reaction to the convention, in The American Scholar in early November, 1969. He claimed that the reason for the split was a newfound goal of distancing the SDS from the bourgeois or ivory tower activism that the SDS had previously embraced, instead toward “questions of race and an international revolutionary movement.” [5] While New York City absolutely has symbolic value as the epitome of American capitalism, it was also the racial aspect of NYC drew leaders such as Bernardine Dohrn towards New York. As a group with goals of interracial solidarity, accessibility to their allies, the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Young Lords Organization (YLO) in Harlem made NYC an obvious choice. These leaders, along with Ted Gold and Diana Oughton, another member of the Weathermen who would later be killed in the explosion following the Convention, would take a trip to the revolutionary beacon that was Cuba. [6]

This trip to Cuba would inform these Weathermen of the beauty and intricacy that would come with interracial solidarity, and a focus on urban guerilla warfare. New York City fit the bill for both ideals. While both the BPP and YLO local headquarters were in NYC, Harlem is not necessarily adjacent to Greenwich Village. However, it was close enough that Zayd Dohrn, the son of Bernardine and Bill Ayers who was a toddler at the height of his parents’ radicalism, remembers traveling up to Harlem for his parents to meet with Panthers. [7] Beyond this, being in New York City allowed for a new battleground for the “white fighting force supporting Black liberation.” [8]

A photograph of Greenwich Village Townhouses from 1938. [9]

Now what brought these radicals to this specific townhouse in Greenwich Village? Historically, Greenwich Village was a neighborhood in NYC that had been built as upscale, and exclusive housing in the mid-1800s. It would even serve as the home for the founder the successful investment management company Merrill-Lynch, Charles Merrill and later the birthplace of the American poet, James Merrill. [10] It was Americana like this specific NYC neighborhood that the Weathermen sought to upend.

In more practical and even simple terms, the Greenwich was where Cathy Wilkerson, one of the Weathermen who would survive the explosion, owned a family home that she was given permission to stay in by her father, at 18 West 11th Street. So, Wilkerson invited Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold, and Kathy Boudin to stay in the house for the time being.

Once they arrived at the house, the five young radicals discovered that none of them had much experience building bombs, or even using weapons for that matter. Following in the footsteps of national leaders such as Bill Ayers, who had placed a bomb outside a police office in Detroit, the initial goal of these Weathermen in NYC was to attack a police stronghold, such as a station. [11] So, Terry Robbins took it upon himself to create and throw Molotov cocktails at police vehicles, stations, and even a judge’s home in the city. The problem was, many of these acts of violence went completely unnoticed due to the Molotov cocktails failing to work properly or that the cocktails caused such little damage that government officials assumed it was petty vandalism.

Having a definitive home-base in Greenwich Village gave the Weathermen confidence to work on more serious acts of terror. It was an unsuspecting and serene place, yet it had every amenity that the Weathermen needed: space to build weapons, access to allies, and privacy. These characteristics of access, privacy, and space, which may seem mutually exclusive in other cities across the country, or certainly bourgeois suburbs, coexisted perfectly in NYC for these Weathermen. Retrospectively, both historians and government officials alike claim that there was a transition towards a “program of intended lethal violence” that sought not only destruction of property, but also death. [12] So, for these NYC-based Weathermen, there was no better place for these acts of intentional violence than the opposite side of New York: Columbia University. 

Columbia University served as an ideal target for a few reasons. The first of which is the bourgeois nature that the University held so dearly, and their utter disregard for marginalized populations living adjacent to their campus, in Harlem. The University saw little issue with building a new gymnasium that would displace Black residents of Harlem, in 1968, among other times. [13] So, as a white fighting force for Black liberation, the Weathermen took issue with Columbia. Unity with the BPP and Black residents in Harlem over oppression from a well-endowed university reinforced the belief that New York City was the right place to be. Beyond that, there was at that time, already a rich history of radical campus activism. In 1968, students and faculty alike staged class walk outs and occupation of campus buildings to protest the war in Vietnam, much like what was seen recently in protest of the Israeli war on Palestine, and in the 1980s as a protest to apartheid in South Africa. [14] Along with Columbia University, a military ball scheduled for early March was another target for the bombs.

The bomb construction began in late February of 1970. It is often noted in historiography of this event that none of these five had any experience building bombs, let alone experience in the sciences. Terry Robbins led the building of the bombs, with a simple circuit that he had learned from other revolutionaries. There were massive problems with this, as it had few safety features, to which other group members like Wilkerson raised objections, but were ignored. [15] After working on the bombs for a couple weeks, in the early morning hours of March 6th, Cathy Wilkerson was ironing clothes on the first floor when she felt the floor beneath her shake, and ultimately begin to collapse. The bomb in the basement had prematurely exploded. [16]

Amidst the chaos, Wilkerson called out for Boudin, who she knew had been in the shower at the time, to help her look for Robbins and Oughton who she believed were in the basement, as she thought Ted Gold had left the house. [17] As the building began to collapse, Cathy Wilkerson realized that she could not find anyone besides Boudin, and grief immediately hit her.  However, this grief would be at least somewhat short lived, as she realized that the police and fire on the scene would quickly realize that this was not just a freak gas explosion.

After regaining their footing, both literally and figuratively, Boudin and Wilkerson were forced underground, as they would run from authorities for years after the explosion. [18] While of course the bomb(s) did not explode on their intended target(s), the shock value of the entire situation remained high enough to both scare average civilians and put the US government on high alert.  As detailed in Daniel Chard’s book on leftist guerillas in the US at the time, framing, or the way that these events were talked about in the media and by government officials, was crucial to painting the picture for events of leftist guerilla warfare. Above all, Chard argues that the framing of leftist guerilla violence, even violence that was not fully hatched (i.e., the townhouse explosion), as terrorism, allowed for a reorganization of FBI resources to combat this violence. [19]

Regardless, this guerilla warfare from the Weathermen, or at the very least, attempt at guerilla warfare, was never identified as war by the opposition, which in this case was the US government. To them, it was simply domestic terrorism. So, did the Weathermen, in this specific instance, bring the war home? On a basic level—yes. Home, as most would assume, can be both an abstract and a finite concept. It must not be forgotten that the platform of the Weathermen was guerilla warfare, turning NYC into Saigon, bringing the Vietnam War home to America. In this case, the abstract “home” was the United States of America, or more specifically New York City, did experience some level of war-like conditions. Panic or worry about why there was an explosion. Proliferation of news of chaos, not knowing what to believe. And above all, anxiety, about if or when it could happen again.

Dustin Hoffman carrying a painting away from the aftermath of the explosion adjacent to his Greenwich Village home. [20]

Some of the lasting images of the Greenwich Townhouse explosion come to contradict the idea of the war being brought home. Perhaps the most famous of the bunch is a photograph of Dustin Hoffman, a famous actor who lived adjacent to the Weathermen house, carrying a valuable painting from his home out of danger.  While it is true that Hoffman likely had no idea of the details of what had happened next door, it serves as an ironic representation of American capital taking precedent over all else, as Hoffman seeks to save the valuable painting above all else.

Through a wider lens, these Weathermen did not bring the war home. It did not spark a larger array of guerilla warfare across NYC, never mind across the entire US, like the group had hoped. That is not to say that this event did not rock the world around the townhouse.  It rocked the very fibers of the eloquent and ornate neighborhood that was Greenwich village. It caused the US Congress to take leftist guerilla violence more seriously, and the cultural significance would be cemented in a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, James Merrill. In “18 West 11 Street,” Merrill writes:

Scentless and shaven, wall-to-wall

Extravagance without variety…

That morning’s buzzing vacuum be fed [21]

This poem, the news coverage, and the reaction from various US Government agencies and officials, will forever remember the Greenwich Townhouse explosion as something that truly brought a painful and tragic “variety” to an area that grew ignorant to the pangs of warfare destroying nations abroad.

Brendan Mahoney is a BA/MA student in the history department at Boston College.  His work focuses on the legacies of anti-war activism from the "long 1960s," as well as the Irish-American Catholic diaspora.

[1] Jerry Mosey, March 6, 1970: Greenwich Townhouse Explosion, March 6, 1970, March 6, 1970, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anxiety/episodes/episode-5-politics-violent.

[2] Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, “Printed Ephemera Collection on Students for a Democratic Society PE.035,” Tamiment Library Archives, 2018, “Bring the War Home!” Pamphlet (1969), http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/pe_035/dscaspace_ref121.html.

[3] Todd Gitlin, The Sixties : Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Random House Publishing Group, 2013), 403, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6089259#.

[4] Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen Underground, 1st ed.. (New York: William Morrow, 2009), 193.

[5] Michael Kazin, “Some Notes on S.D.S.,” The American Scholar 38, no. 4 (1969): 655.

[6] United States, The Weather Underground Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session. (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1975), 5, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000035751.

[7] Robert Moran, “‘As a Four-Year-Old, I Knew the FBI Was Chasing Us. But I Didn’t Know Why,’” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 29, 2022, sec. TV & radio, https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/as-a-four-year-old-i-knew-the-fbi-was-chasing-us-but-i-didn-t-know-why-20220620-p5av36.html.

[8] You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows, 1969, http://archive.org/details/YouDontNeedAWeathermanToKnowWhichWayTheWindBlows_925.

[9] Bernice Abbot, Tenth Street Studio Building 51 West 10th Street, 1938, 1938, Museum of the City of New York, https://www.villagepreservation.org/2019/04/18/artists-homes-of-the-greenwich-village-historic-district/.

[10] Mel Gussow, “The House On West 11th Street,” The New York Times, March 5, 2000, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/05/nyregion/the-house-on-west-11th-street.html.

[11] Bryan Burrough, “Meet The Weather Underground’s Bomb Guru,” Vanity Fair, March 29, 2015, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/03/weather-underground-bomb-guru-burrough-excerpt.

[12] Arthur M. Eckstein, Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution (Yale University Press, 2016), 7.

[13] Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, 1st ed.. (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 81.

[14] Roger S. Powers and William B. Vogele, Protest, Power, and Change: An Encyclopedia of Nonviolent Action from ACT-UP to Women’s Suffrage, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities ; Vol. 1625 (New York: Garland Publ., 1997), 481–82.

[15] Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman, First Edition (Seven Stories Press, 2007), 359.

[16] Wilkerson, 362.

[17] Wilkerson, 360–61.

[18] Daniel S. Chard, Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism (UNC Press Books, 2021), 84.

[19] Chard, 100.

[20] Frank Castoral, Actor Dustin Hoffman Hurries Away from His Greenwich Village Townhouse with a Painting He Was Able to Save after Three Noontime Blasts Devastated an Adjoining House at 18 W. 11th St., March 6, 1970, Photograph, March 6, 1970, NY Daily News, https://historycollection.com/photos-communist-organization-declared-war-united-states-government/.

[21] James Merrill, “18 West 11th Street,” The New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/06/29/18-west-11th-street/.