1970: Bomb rocks World Trade Center construction site
An early morning blast ripped a two-foot wide hole into the bottom of an office trailer at the construction site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan 39 years ago this month, at a time of heightened tensions between anti-Vietnam War radicals and building workers.
No one was hurt in the 2:26 a.m. explosion on May 30, but some $3,000 worth of blueprints and other papers were destroyed, and windows were shattered within two blocks of the scene. The trailer, owned by general contractor Tishman Realty Company, was parked at the corner of Liberty and Greenwich streets, about 1,800 feet from the construction site.
Although no suspects were identified in the attack, left-wing radicals opposed to the Vietnam War were believed to be behind similar attacks.
A Tishman Company official said the firm had received several bomb threats in the weeks before the attack and had evacuated the site as recently as May 27 because of one such threat.
The two 110-story office buildings were officially dedicated on April 1973. The twin towers were damaged by a terrorist truck bombing in 1993 and destroyed in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
1946: Post-war scammers target co-op buyers
Authorities accused real estate speculators of using fraudulent and coercive tactics while selling cooperative apartment units in the midst of a housing crisis, 63 years ago this month.
The scams included selling shares of buildings to rental tenants who were told they would be evicted unless they purchased their units. Apartment buyers often purchased a unit occupied by a rental tenant with the false hope that they would be able to evict the current dweller.
Renters and purchasers were susceptible to the rackets because of the tight housing market at the close of World War II. A study in 1946 showed vacancies were so few that the city needed 264,500 units just to fulfill the surging demand.
While increases in rents were severely limited by federal law, maintenance fees in a co-op could be raised, providing an incentive for the scams.
The tenants who bought their own apartment units often paid more in maintenance fees than they had paid in rent, an investigation showed. The sellers coerced the tenants to buy, for example, by telling them that 75 percent of a building had agreed to go co-op, and if they did not buy, the apartment would be sold out from under them.
Authorities predicted that once vacancy rates began to creep up, the high prices paid for the units would not be warranted. An article from the New York Times cited a victim in a Park Avenue co-op apartment who had been paying $6,000 per year in rent and under pressure bought his apartment for $18,000. As an owner, he was now paying an annual maintenance fee of $6,000 plus carrying costs.
In August of that year, a group of the city’s largest real estate management firms, the Tenant-Owned Apartment Association, developed a code of ethics that forbade coercion and high-pressure sales tactics.
1901: Macy’s unveils plans for flagship store at Herald Square
Department store retailer R.H. Macy & Co. revealed plans for a 750,000-square-foot store at Herald Square 108 years ago this month to replace its earlier location at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue.
The state-of-the-art, 10-story flagship location with 180 feet of frontage on Broadway, 275 feet on 34th Street and 325 feet on 35th Street, opened in November 1902.
Assemblage of the site, which had at least 32 buildings owned by a number of individual interests, was considered one of the most complicated deals completed in years.
An article in the New York Times on the store’s opening put its sprawling size into context, calculating that if the floor space was converted into traditional store fronts 25 feet wide by 50 long, it would create a frontage from 18th Street to 125th Street.
In 1924, the store doubled in size to 1.5 million square feet with an addition to the west extending to Seventh Avenue, making it at the time the largest store in the world.
By Adam Pincus