The Townhouse That Blew Itself Up

On the morning of March 6, 1970, members of the Weather Underground were in the basement of a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street, wiring together a bomb packed with dynamite and nails meant to act as shrapnel, built for a noncommissioned officers' dance that night at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Something went wrong with the wiring and the device went off where it sat, killing Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Theodore Gold and leveling the house. Two other members inside, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, climbed out of the wreckage and disappeared into the neighborhood, becoming fugitives for years before Wilkerson surrendered in 1980 and Boudin was arrested in 1981. The lot sat empty for most of a decade before architect Hugh Hardy built a strange, angled modernist house on the site in 1978, an outlier on a block of otherwise uniform row houses.