The A Thousand Words series tells the fuller story behind pictures from current or future Rama tours. This photo is from the tour “Union Square,” currently available for free download to the app.
The term IED, or Improvised Explosive Device, may be relatively new to the English language, but the primitive devices themselves stretch back centuries. Shortly after the turn of the last century, New York’s Union Square was the site of one such attack.
At that time, Union Square only vaguely resembled the eclectic metropolitan park that New Yorkers love today. Originally built to fill in the awkward gap of roadway created by the extension of the two uptown thoroughfares of Broadway and Fourth Avenue (the park was situated at their “union”), Union Square was initially little more than a giant, ovular traffic island—its verdant, garden-like vegetation corralled off from visitors by iron fences. As the city grew upward, however, the increasingly critical location of the park as a commuter hub and the copious opportunities the broad, open roadways created for drawing crowds turned Union Square into a prime gathering place: with vendors hawking seasonal wares, suffragettes agitating for gender equality, and upstart preachers warning of the wrath of a vengeful God.
Bowing to these realities, city planners redesigned the park in 1871 to accommodate—and better control—the park’s role as the city’s prominent place of assembly: pedestrian paths were widened and lined with benches, fences and shrubbery replaced by grass and shade-producing trees, and a mustering ground and reviewing stand built at the southern and northern sides. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the economy depressed and labor law still in its infancy, Union Square rapidly turned into a Petri dish for New York’s discontents.
It was in this context that, on the morning March 29, 1908, organizers and supporters of the Socialist Conference of Unemployed arrived at Union Square to find the park cordoned off and ringed by mounted policemen. Bowing to souring political attitude towards such demonstrations, the NYC Parks Department decided, in the final hour, to ban this Marxist gathering, claiming the organizers lacked the necessary permits. In the confusion that followed, a confrontation occurred between the two groups, and policemen aggressively pushed the demonstrators out of Union Square and into surrounding streets. Poor workers and laborers slipped and fell over one another on rain-slicked flagstones as a few zealous officer set upon beating stragglers with batons.
Only a few hours later, however, police reopened the park, and a serene calm returned to the now-emptied square, with a handful policemen, journalists, and stragglers milling around in the discussing the implications of confrontation. At 3:30 p.m. this false sense of calm shattered when an explosion went off near the fountain. The shock was so powerful that people outside the park were knocked over, as if hit by a strong wind.
The manufacturer of the bomb was a Jewish-Russian tailor named Selig Silverman who, after immigrating to New York and being beaten by a police officer, took an interest in the early anarchist movement. Silverman, still smarting from the beating, sought revenge. Removing a grapefruit-sized knob from the top of his bedstead, he filled it with a quarter-pound of broken nails and topped this with nitroglycerin and gunpowder which, when lit with a cigarette, was intended to act as a fuse. Arriving late to the disbanded rally, Silverman spotted a group of New York’s finest lingering near the center of the park and slinked over to the nearby fountain, surreptitiously preparing to lob his bomb at the group. At the last moment, however, Silverman made a fatal mistake—he inserted his cigarette into the wrong hole of the casing. This caused the bomb to misfire. In the resulting explosion Silverman not only blew off his right arm and blinded himself (he would die of his injuries in Bellevue two weeks later) but also killed Ignatz Hildebrand, an unsuspecting tailor from Orange, New Jersey, who had also showed up late to the rally and was standing nearby.
In the aftermath, a wave of fear swept across the city. The New York Times, for one of the first times ever, published three photos, each of the event, on its front page. Police interrogated the wife of the hapless Hildebrand and had their one Yiddish-speaking officer translate the reams of diaries and letters found in Silverman’s room. Despite ample evidence that Silverman had been working alone to satisfy a personal grudge, suspicions rapidly spread that the event was part of a larger socialist-anarchist plot. The result was one of the first crackdowns on far-left groups in the city—and the beginning of America’s long and troubled relationship with them for the next 80 years.
Today, all evidence of Silverman’s botched attack has been erased by a third renovation that Union Square underwent in 1928 to make way for New York’s first subway lines. The fountain where Silverman and Hildebrand bled on the ground while journalists and prosecutors stood and watched in shock has been removed and been planted with grass. With the rearranged of the pathways and widening of the surrounding roads, too, even less space remains for rallying and protest than before. Still, standing on the grassy lawn in the center of the park, one can still visualize Union Square as the socialist incubator it once was and, perhaps, channel Silverman’s last few glimpses of that tumultuous world.
