Home atop infamous West Village bombing site to get revamp

Project to create flat floors with six bedrooms and seven baths

From left: Justin Korsant and 18 West 11th Street
From left: Justin Korsant and 18 West 11th Street

A Greenwich Village townhouse at 18 West 11th Street with a storied and checkered past is gearing up for an extensive reconstruction and penthouse addition.

The property, site of the leftist group Weather Underground’s accidental bomb detonation in March 1970, was purchased by financier Justin Korsant of Long Light Capital in December 2012 for $9.25 million. Korsant plans to reconstruct the property while hanging on to the notched and jutting facade approved for Landmarks Preservation Commission protection almost 40 years ago, the New York Times reported.

The original home on the site was built in the 1840s by Henry Brevoort Jr., and passed into the hands of Merrill Lynch co-founder Charles Merrill and later Broadway lyricist Howard Dietz in 1930. Advertising executive James Wilkerson bought the home in 1963, and his daughter and four comrades constructed the infamous bomb in the property’s in the basement in 1970.

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Architect Hugh Hardy purchased the cleared site a few years later, selling to a Philadelphia couple in 1978 who rebuilt the house. The house was then sold to Korsant late last year.

The five-story house was built with a front and back split, and divided into a total of 10 units. The planned reconstruction will create flat floors with six bedrooms and seven baths, a spokesperson for H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture — a successor to previous owner Hugh Hardy’s firm who is conducting the renovations — told the Times. [NYT]Julie Strickland