The Bowery Boys and the Black Tom Explosion
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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Pushkin. In 1916, New York was rocked by one of the largest explosions the world had ever experienced. Windows were shattered across Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty was badly damaged. The sound of the explosion could be heard down in Philadelphia. But how did this catastrophe occur? Was it a dreadful accident?

Or was it, perhaps, sabotage by foreign agents? I'll be hosting Cautionary Tales as usual next week, but this week I'm handing the detonator over to the Bowery Boys. The tale they're about to tell you involves fireworks, spies, opera singers, suspected sex workers, German nobility and cigar bombs. It's quite the story.

Bowery Boys is a fortnightly podcast all about the history of New York City. It's full of fascinating curiosities and surprising stories. The hosts, Greg Young and Tom Myers, have been making the show since 2007, so as you can imagine, they really know what they're talking about. You can, of course, find the Bowery Boys podcast in all the usual places. So now, Cautionary Tales presents Danger in the Harbour from the Bowery Boys.

The Bowery Boys, episode 197, Danger in the Harbor, the Black Tom Explosion. Hey, it's the Bowery Boys. Hey. ♪♪

Hi there. Welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. And this is Tom Myers. There once was a very special place in one of America's most famous landmarks where visitors got to observe the New York Harbor from a very unique perspective. But for almost 100 years, that vantage spot, that place at this landmark has been permanently closed. This is the story of how that came to be.

This is a story about millions of pounds of war munitions and explosives that were detonated late one Saturday night in 1916. It shook the entire region and it alarmed an entire nation. A nation that was trying to remain neutral as war spread throughout Europe.

Today we refer to this event as the Black Tom Explosion, which is named for a very small island that was right up the coast of New Jersey in the New York Harbor, an island which is no longer there because of this event. This is generally considered to be the largest German act of sabotage on U.S. soil during World War I. It's an event that is so dramatic, and yet it's something that I feel that

is relatively unknown or not remembered today. The story is quite intriguing, very death-defying, and very surprising. So join us as we investigate the danger in New York Harbor and the Black Tom explosion of 1916. ♪

So Tom, you and I are about to discuss the Black Tom explosion, which happened in the early morning hours of July 30th, 1916. Right, and it happened on Black Tom Island, which is a small island just off Liberty Island and Ellis Island, just to the west of those in New York Harbor.

Now, this island, Black Tom, let's just get this out of the way. It is allegedly named after the island's one-time only resident, an African-American fisherman who went by the name Black Tom. It was...

originally a very small, tiny little thing. It was connected later to the mainland in New Jersey by a land bridge in the late 19th century, and railroad tracks were laid upon the land bridge, and the island, Black Tom Island, was used as a railroad depot in the turn of the century. So it was actually a sizable island. It wasn't super tiny. It actually had enough space for a few buildings. Well, it was built up with landfill. So

So it would end up being much larger than the original natural island. But yes, they would build this mile-long pier into New York Harbor to which vessels and barges could be docked on the island itself. There were plenty of warehouses, depots for the trains. It was a pretty big operation. And by 1905, the railroad facility was owned and operated by the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

They ran the shipping port, and they were the ones responsible for expanding the island. And shortly thereafter, the island fell under the jurisdiction of Jersey City, so it was part of greater Jersey City. So a routine industrial island delivering freight back and forth between ships and the railroad. Yes, and it had a prized position right here in New York Harbor.

It seemed to operate without much drama for much of its existence. The only thing of note that I could find in the papers was a small piece, like three paragraphs, in the New York Times on July 17th, 1907, about two sailors who had drowned off the island. The headline was, "...drown in each other's arms."

two schooner hands on furlough apparently fell off the bridge. And later in the article it states, it is presumed that while walking along the narrow plank on the bridge leading from the island to the shore, one of the sailors fell off and the other attempted to rescue him. The island was really just known for its shipping business, a business that turned to munitions and firearms and explosives with the onset of World War I. What

Which I'll get into a little bit more detail in a second. Right. But let's just say at this point that by 1915, because of developments in the war and the blockade of Germany by the British Royal Navy, the U.S., even though the U.S. was a neutral country at this time, the U.S. was

was only trading arms with the Allied forces, so Great Britain, France, and Russia. So shipping lots of explosives through New York Harbor, and specifically this particular place. Right. The railroads would bring these explosives across the country from their munition plants to Jersey City and out along this land bridge to unload into the warehouses or directly onto barges that would take them out to the ships. And

They weren't exactly advertising this fact that they were shipping off, you know, dynamite and all manner of other explosives because that wasn't really something that they wanted residents to know too much about. Not exciting. Nor did they want, you know, German secret agents who were, of course, by that point, crawling around lower Manhattan, kind of gazing around, trying to figure out where pro-allied activity was taking place.

But this is kind of the setup for the summer of 1916. Why don't we pull back a little bit maybe to the start of the war in 1914? Right. So war had broken out in Europe in 1914 between the central powers, that's Germany and Austria-Hungary, versus the allied powers, which was initially Great Britain and France and Russia. Now, these two sides would gain additional nations as the conflict continued for years.

The U.S., under President Woodrow Wilson, would declare itself neutral, but would end up really only trading munitions with the Allied forces,

which was noticed by the German secret agents. So there's already German secret agents in the city, even at the beginning of the war, right? Because I assume they were kind of stranded here, right? Well, some, but we have to look at the ambassador from Germany who came to the neutral United States to serve as ambassador. That's a man named Count Johann von Bernstorff.

who brought with him to Washington and to his New York office, because he had an office at 60 Wall Street. Not your typical cast of diplomats, but instead a rather colorful cast of characters, and a huge budget, $150 million, much of which was slated for intelligence gathering and

and sabotage, where they would, among other things, issue fake passports to German undercover agents to go off to France and to Great Britain. So the passports themselves were actually real passports. But what they would do is bribe or just pay off men who were out of work and, you know, would

weren't planning on going out of the country anytime soon. So they would get real passports and then, of course, would then be faked with the names and identities of Germans who were already residing in New York at this time. So then they could go back and engage in battle back home. But they were also issuing fake passports to allow undercover agents to travel to France and to Great Britain. And spy over there. And spy for the Central Powers. Right.

But of course a great, great majority of the German-Americans who were living in New York, millions of people who had immigrated into the United States in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century, were not at all involved in any of this. And furthermore, they had assimilated quite well into the American society.

becoming successful businessmen, very well-respected citizens. So this was dragging their reputation a bit through the mud. There were already two or three generations of German immigrants in New York City who were basically the bedrock of a lot of neighborhoods. So of course, there was also a lot of anti-German sentiment. And meanwhile, the yellow press was filled with sensational stories of saboteurs and of German double agents.

men popping out of cars in the middle of the night and running down alleyways. It was all spy and all intrigue.

But some of that was rooted in fact, because between 1914 and 1918, German agents sabotaged more than 50 sites in the US, and 30 of those were in New York alone, which isn't really that surprising that there would be so many that were sabotaged in New York and New York Harbor because the area was home to so many factories and such important large ports shipping things back to Europe.

So then it would make sense that this little island, Black Tom Island, with this very active railroad bridge, with these warehouses, with these barges loading munitions on ships, would be a prime target.

I'm glad we got back to this point because I want to spend a little bit more time here on the absurdity of munitions and explosives being built. We're talking millions and millions of pounds of explosives that came through here that were either manufactured here or that were, of course, being transferred from here. This was not just a phenomena of World War I. This is actually how it had been for decades.

A sort of lighter example of this, of course, was the many dozens of places around here that manufactured fireworks. Well, for a short time even, fireworks were sold on a street just off of City Hall. And it was nicknamed Firecracker Lane. There would be several distributors of fireworks in the middle of the city. Wow. For a short while. Buildings would actually catch on fire here. So, yeah. So, they had to eventually run that out of town, clearly. But...

Because of this, a lot of businesses around the area, including Staten Island, which was also very well known for these kind of places, they sort of had fireworks as their kind of cover. But what they actually manufactured were things that were a lot more serious than

either munitions or the machinery or chemicals that could make munitions. And these were produced in factories in New York City? Yes. And so you may, of course, wonder why. But by the time of World War I, America was actually in a financial slump. There was almost 1 million people unemployed. This war had cut into profits in other ways, in other industries. And

and really damaged the export industry for a short time anyway. But munitions were a growth industry here, right? So if you were already manufacturing fireworks and it was legal, why wouldn't you just sort of expand it if you knew you could get a lot more income, right?

Makes perfect sense, although it sounds still pretty dangerous. As production increased here in these years, as you mentioned, there were a larger number of accidents. Between 1914 and 1916, there were the most accidents because, of course, they weren't just manufacturing fireworks. But that was always the cover. A smokescreen, if you will. Definitely a smokescreen. One example of one of these quote-unquote fireworks companies was

On October 3rd, 1914, in Jersey City, so really not that far from Black Tom, the Twiller and Street fireworks plant exploded. Four people were killed instantly. And the New York Tribune actually noted the unwillingness of the executives to even talk about the blast at all. Because, of course, they weren't supposed to be making munitions. They were just supposed to be making celebration goods. Yeah.

Did they expect foul play? Or was it just another case of a fireworks factory exploding? Well, an eerie parallel to the story that we're about to tell, it is later believed that this particular fireworks plant was sabotaged. But the thing is, is that there were these explosions all the time. That's the sort of sad reality. But these things kind of happened once in a while. And because of just the improper care of these particular explosive devices. Right.

But Germans already by this time, by 1914, when this fireworks plant exploded, these were already being targeted. So from a book I read called The German Secret Service in America, 1914 to 1918, quote, a circular dated November 18th, 1914, issued by German naval headquarters to all naval agents throughout the world, ordered, mobilized all agents who are overseas and all destroying agents,

in ports where vessels carrying war material are loaded in England, France, Canada, the United States, and Russia. So the thing I guess that we've really reinforced here is even though we were neutral, we were essentially the enemy and we were essentially on the Allied side. And this is further proof that there were German agents living here and operating here. In New York City, here's an excerpt, Tom, from a German notebook that

that outlined the code phrases that operatives would use when they were talking on the telephone in New York City. Okay? Okay. So this is from the code book. Is it in German? It's been translated. Oh, man. I'm not very good at German. That would be kind of funny to have me read the German and then translate it. But no.

Quote, a street number in Manhattan named over the telephone means that the meeting will take place five blocks further uptown than the street mentioned. Pennsylvania Railroad Station means Grand Central Depot. Hotel Ansonia means the cafe at the Hotel Manhattan basement.

Hotel Belmont means at the bar in Pabst in Columbus Circle, unquote. And it went on and on and on that one place would actually mean another place. And these would change. Sounds really confusing. You have to really be up on your cracked codes here because it would change every single month. We would be so bad at this, Greg. We would constantly be in the wrong bar in the wrong hotel. I would always be showing up at Pabst going like, where's my spies at?

No, but so there's cafes all over the place. There's a lot of meeting spots, okay, where a lot of diabolical behavior was being crafted. But perhaps the center of all German intrigues in World War I was, in fact, in a townhouse in Chelsea, Tom. The address is 123 West 15th Street. That's between 6th Avenue and 7th Avenue.

This was the home of renowned opera singer, Baroness Martha Held. Wait, the so-called center of German intrigues was in a Baroness opera singer's Chelsea townhouse? Yes.

Her name was Martha Held. Now, it was from a marriage that we don't really know where she got the name. Perhaps she just started to call herself the Baroness. Every description that I've read of her describes her as a robust woman. A striking brunette, according to this author, Jules Whitcover, quote, "...busty and buxom with shiny black hair, dark blue eyes, a pointed chin, and a voice that could shatter China." Unquote. Unquote.

The nation or the plate? The plates. Many plates. Probably not the whole nation. Maybe a smaller country. Well, anyway, her parlor was frequently filled with guests, entertained, of course, by Ms. Held's voice. But, of course, it was a very fancy house, perhaps a little too fancy for a modestly successful opera singer. From the moment she first rented this townhouse, neighbors began suspecting that perhaps Ms.

She was a madam, for there were many gentlemen callers who snuck in through the basement door. This kind of behavior would have been seen further up in the Tenderloin and perhaps not a surprise in this area during this time. The suspicious landlord declared, quote, I noticed there was a great deal of wine and liquor about in the house. Always had a German atmosphere. What does that mean?

A German atmosphere. I should continue. Mrs. Held told me on several occasions that the sea captains on the German boats were accustomed to coming there, and she said she would give them little dinners at night.

So this was in fact a safe house for German intelligence officers and operatives that were connected to the top level German ambassador, von Bernstorff, the man that you mentioned earlier. Right. So this was a hotbed of scheming and scandal. Ms. Held actually had young women callers around to entertain the men. So it certainly looked a lot like a brothel. Now, one frequent guest and a woman who will come in to play a very important way later in the story is a young lady named Maina Rice.

She would, of course, be known as the Eastman Girl, for she was a model in Eastman Kodak advertisements. A very lovely young woman. Oh, I hear her career was developing. Let me give you a little snapshot of her time in the house from a book from 1937 called The Enemy Within, which describes some of Mina's testimony regarding her time in the townhouse. Quote,

The destruction of munitions and factories and other equipment, which was of service to the Allied government, was a constant topic of conversation. Sometimes English was spoken, but even when German was used, which was generally the case, Ms. Rice, Ms. Edwards, she had been married by this particular time in 1937, although she could not talk the language fluently, understood enough German to follow what was said.

At these conferences, bombs were often carefully handed around. Men brought them in satchels from Hoboken, and Madame Held stored them in a cupboard in readiness to be given later to others who carried them away. Hold on, hold on, or held on here. They're passing around bombs? How big are these bombs? I've seen them described in several different ways. One of them is a cigar bomb. Another I've seen as a pencil bomb.

The pencil bombs. I read about these. So apparently they would just pass undetected because they would be so small and say be boarded onto a ship and their slow burning fuse could sort of eat away at the pencil bomb and cause an explosion often when the ship was way out at sea. So it's a kind of extraordinary thing, right? To imagine these very deadly objects in satchels and briefcases and

in a townhouse here on 15th Street, right? And not only bombs, it would be blueprints that would be unfurled. It would be photographs that would be carefully examined. Just imagine the scene of a typical evening here in the parlor of German operatives here

describing destroying things here in the New York City area. And then absurdly, as pictures of Ms. Held stare down upon these particular events, then Ms. Held would then frequently break into operatic song here, as Ms. Rice here is sort of floating around the edge, kind of listening to everything.

Sounds sinister. Well, one evening, a few days before the sabotage out at Black Tom, two chemists, according to Maina, came into the house with explosive chemicals. They were stored up in the cupboard. And then they began speaking about something that was about to happen very, very soon. She got freaked out. In fact, that weekend left town. So she's not even in town for the events that we're about to describe here. So she took off. Did she tell anybody on her way out of town?

She didn't. This is kind of one of the big mysteries of this whole story. One theory is the fact that if she announced her participation in this or that she went to this house, that no one would believe her and would look at her life and the number of times she would go there and think, oh, well, you're a prostitute at a brothel and you're just trying to cover this up. She didn't feel like she had a lot of credibility in this.

And it's true, who knows if they would have listened to her, but I mean, we'll never know that now. And I should mention that another thing that really freaked her out was the conversation about watchmen out at Black Tom who had been paid off over the past couple months. Paid off to sort of look the other way, if not exactly assist Black

In the sabotage that was about to occur. So she was hearing people actually discuss details involving the phrase Black Tom Island. Yes, she did. And she didn't really reveal all of this until her full testimony all the way in 1937.

So on the evening of January 29th, 1916, a group of saboteurs headed that evening to Black Tom Island. Again, a lot of the details are a little hazy because, of course, many of these people would escape and never be caught for their crimes. So we're piecing together information of the events of this particular evening. But there were two saboteurs, two Germans by the name of Lothar Witzke and Kurt Janka, and they traveled by boat.

They traveled by a small rowboat and crossed the Hudson River to Black Tom Island and had no resistance. People later did say that they saw two men in a rowboat, but nothing was done about it. Meanwhile, there was a third saboteur named Michael Kristof who traveled over land, did not come via boat, and he got to the site as well thanks to some of these bribes that had been distributed throughout the past few weeks.

Now, unfortunately, the rail yards were filled with locomotives, filled with two to four million pounds of explosives. So this was just a little bit before midnight. Within two or three hours, New York City and the entire region would be shaken to the bone. We'll get to the details of this chaotic, frightening event after the commercial break.

Cautionary tales will return with Danger in the Harbor in just a moment.

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Tim Harford here. You're listening to The Bowery Boys on Cautionary Tales. Back to Greg and Tom.

So it's Saturday, July 29th, 1916. It's a very warm summer's night. It was now after midnight. So we're in the very early morning of Sunday, July 30th. It's still hot and the air is thick with mosquitoes. On Black Tom Island, there are 70 to 100 railroad cars that were stopped in their tracks for the night. They were packed with more than a thousand tons of munitions.

And just off the island on the piers, freighters and barges sat tied up, many packed and waiting for the morning to be shipped off to England and France. It was a huge amount of munitions, even more than usual.

And there were some guards. There were, what, six or eight guards walking around the island? There were some detectives. They were hired, actually, by the British, who did suspect that there might be some kind of sabotage or foul play. But they certainly weren't enough. Well, and there was a lot to guard. They had all those warehouses. They had the ships. They had the hundred train cars.

Some of these guards had lit so-called smudge pots. These are pots that were meant to keep the mosquitoes away because it's just so hot and sticky and you know how awful it gets. Kind of like a citronella candle is today if you're sitting on your patio. But a smudge pot to get the mosquitoes out of the air. Now, just after midnight, some of the guards spotted fires on the island and on the pier.

Some of the guards tried to put it out right away as best they could, while others sensed the danger that they were in, and they raced to land over to Jersey City to call upon the fire department. And firemen responded, but they were extremely cautious and concerned. What were they supposed to do? Everybody knew the big danger here. It was tied up right there to the pier.

There was this huge cargo barge called the Johnson 17. It was packed with 100,000 pounds of dynamite just tied up to that pier and the fire was just drawing closer. And despite their efforts, at 2:08 in the morning, the Johnson 17 caught fire and it exploded.

rocking the tiny island and sending thousands of pounds of shrapnel through the air. It was an incredibly powerful explosion. In today's terms, it would measure a 5.5 on the Richter scale, like an earthquake. It's almost hard to imagine. Well, and it was felt 90 miles away, as far away as Philadelphia. And so you can imagine just right here in the harbor, across from Black Tom Island, how it pounded the skies and it rattled the ground.

flinging residents in New York and New Jersey out of their beds and into the streets and shattering glass everywhere. Not just some glass, but like thousands and thousands of panes of glass all through the city.

The next day's papers, it was almost the only thing on the front page. From the New York Times the next day, the headline, barge cargos blow up, sparks from small blaze reach explosives, firemen trapped, city is terror stricken, great part of population rushes to the streets, many in night attire seeking safety.

The article starts, A series of explosions, beginning with a terrifying one at 2.08 this morning, shook New York and New Jersey and spread panic and destruction through the city and suburbs.

The explosion occurred on 14 barges stored with high explosives at the piers of the National Storage Company on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor, opposite Bedloe's Island. Firemen who were fighting the fire were hurled high into the air as the first barge of explosives let go. Firemen shot, Greg, 50 feet in the air.

The papers, city officials didn't know at that point the next day how many people had died. In fact, in this article, they're estimating that 33 people perished. That would later come down quite a bit. Around 10, it was estimated. Still today, there's some ambiguity about the number of people who perished in this.

However, the article continues, that there was loss of life, however, was certain. Firemen blackened by smoke and their clothing torn to tatters came staggering out of the smoke, but they were two days to tell what had happened. So this was a 208, this first big giant explosion that sent shrapnel through the air and through the entire area.

But that wasn't the only explosion. There would be additional explosions throughout the night, a second smaller one about 30 minutes later, and smaller ones all through the night. By 3.30 in the morning, according to the Times, quote, the entire island, Black Tom Island, appeared to be covered in a sheet of flame. It must have almost looked as if Jersey City was on fire. Yes, for those who were able to get over to the water's edge and look across and see, but...

But millions of people in New York woke up at the same moment. Some were still up because it was just 2 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night. Yeah, some of them were up at Columbus Circle still partying, still having dinner, still dancing. But many more had tucked themselves into bed at home or in hotels and...

got out of bed or fell out of bed and ran out into the street to see what in the world had happened. You know, it wasn't like most people just immediately suspected that munitions over on Black Tom Island had exploded. Most people thought that there was something much closer to where they were that had exploded.

perhaps even on their own block. Many firemen who lived in Manhattan, their natural inclination was to actually head down to the Italian quarter, to where Little Italy is today, because many of them assumed it was bombs related to the Black Hand, to Italian blackmailers who frequently left small bombs all over the city. So that was their first assumption. So this was just a major version of that.

And that was just one hypothesis. People were pulling fire alarms and calling fire stations all over town thinking that there had been an explosion right in their neighborhood. They were calling the police department. So there was a crazy amount of police and fire activity trying to get through streets that were clogged already with panicked residents trying to figure out what had happened. So it was complete chaos. It was really described as rush hour traffic.

And of course, with the police tied up and false reports of buildings being dynamited, there was some report of looters taking advantage of the situation. And panes of glass all over the city, thousands of windows shattered from the financial district, all of J.P. Morgan's offices, windows shattered to Times Square, to Riverside Drive.

The windows of the New York Public Library shattered on Fifth Avenue. And at Times Square, guests jumped from their beds at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and they raced in their pajamas into Times Square. And meanwhile, and you can just imagine the chaos of this situation, at the same time, a water main burst in Sixth Avenue near 42nd Street and flooded a block in four directions, according to the Times. It must have seemed like the world was ending in 42nd and Sixth Avenue. From the Times, 42nd.

Scary. Yeah.

It shaked and it rattled and it actually swayed the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, and the Williamsburg bridges, causing panic among the people who were crossing in automobiles and crossing by foot. A building on Myrtle Avenue and Washington Street had been, quote, knocked down by the explosion. There was a lot of shaking around the Borough Hall neighborhood, including the offices of the Brooklyn Eagle, where the staff was busy getting out the next day's paper, and all of a sudden all of their windows shattered.

And meanwhile in New Jersey, a two and a half month old child in Jersey City was tragically thrown from his crib and died from the shock. In Jersey City, practically every window shattered. And to make matters only worse, basically every telephone line between New York and New Jersey was down. The connection had been blown up.

You're describing all of these panes of glass breaking, like thousands and thousands and thousands of windows here. I actually, I just can't believe that there are actually no deaths attributed to all of these broken glass. I mean, there were certainly hundreds of injuries, but because it was so early in the morning that there weren't actually a lot of people on the streets for the initial blast, right? For the glass coming down onto the sidewalks and streets, but then also all of the people, you know...

hundreds of thousands of people who raced out into streets and tried to figure out what was going on, and thousands of people who tried to make their way over to the water's edge to see what was happening and to gaze upon the spectacle of the fire as it was burning. You can imagine how dangerous it was to have these thousands of people stomping upon all of this broken glass. So you've told us about Jersey City and Manhattan and Brooklyn, but what about the two islands that are actually closest here to Black Tom, which was...

Bedloe's Island, of course, Liberty Island, and Ellis Island. Well, on Ellis Island, about 600 to 700 immigrants, many of them who were patients at the hospital facility on the island, had to be transferred to Manhattan. And meanwhile, over on Bedloe's Island, shrapnel actually struck the back of the Statue of Liberty, doing great damage, $100,000 in damage to her torch and to her robe.

Imagine, Greg, these bullets and these bombs that had been meant for a war in Europe actually attacking instead the very symbol of liberty here in the United States. That is some unfortunate symbolism here. When it was all done, Black Tom Island was almost entirely destroyed. Its pier and its docks nearly completely demolished.

And we both saw conflicting numbers of people killed in the explosions. I saw as few as seven. I saw 10. Also, it's difficult to say because so many people suffered from injuries and from falls that were related to this incident, but were not directly attributed to it. One of those victims was the captain of the Johnson 17, whose body washed up onto the shore of Jersey City just a few days later.

The explosions resulted in over $20 million in damages in 1916 dollars, which is about $500 million worth of damage today. And you want to know the really sad thing about this? The sad statement of the day is even this explosion, this massive explosion, the biggest explosion that most people had ever seen, ever experienced. Well, many just presumed it was an accident.

There have been many people warning about all these, the extra storage of explosives that were on this island and how it needed to get off of this island. It needed to be distributed a little bit better.

In fact, afterwards, some of the first arrests were actually officials at the plant here at Black Tom's who were later charged with, quote, criminal and gross negligence. These were the guards? These were the owners of some of the warehouses and the plants here. Now, do you remember Michael Kristoff? He was one of the three saboteurs who traveled along land, who got him because of the bribery of the guards. Right. Well, he was actually arrested in Bayonne, New Jersey.

He was questioned and then let go because he was presumed to be a little deranged, actually. And the weirdest detail about him, and we'll get to him a little bit more later, but the weirdest detail is that after this, in 1917, he then enlists in the U.S. Army. Believe it or not, Tom, just a few months later, on January 11th, 1917...

It is believed that saboteurs struck at another munitions factory just eight miles away in Kingsland, New Jersey. Today, that's Lindhurst, New Jersey, if you're familiar with that town. This was equally forceful in nature, similar to Black Tom's. The damage was about $17 million here. Fortunately, this was not as tragic an explosion, thanks to one brave switchboard operator named Tessie McNamara.

who stayed at her post as the explosion was happening here at Kingsland and transmitted a message to all the buildings on the site. And so because of her, no one died in the Kingsland explosion. And so she became a hero afterwards. Yeah.

Again, speculation of the Kingsland explosion. It was also believed to have just been an accident. You know, I don't know what... Just a freaky coincidence. Yes. Well, I mean, things apparently exploded all the time back then because of all of these factories. And I also think there was just something about... A lot of Americans just didn't want to be pulled into this war until like they absolutely had to. So I think a lot of this...

was trying to prove they were an accident because they didn't want to believe that they were sabotaged. Well, America would enter World War I less than a year after the big Black Tom explosion. And shortly after, Germany, perhaps knowing that U.S. entry into the war was inevitable at this time, had announced unrestricted submarine warfare and had promptly sunk U.S.

another US ship. We forgot to even mention, Tom, the Lusitania that had left New York City and had been another victim of this war. But in terms of the Black Tom, did anybody ever get arrested for this? Amazingly, trying to find the identity of the culprits of the Black Tom disaster would take far longer than the war, would actually take a couple more decades, believe it or not.

The end of the war was on June 28th 1919 when the when

when the Germans and the Allied countries signed the Treaty of Versailles, an investigation into the Black Tom explosion was reopened in 1922 when Congress formed a commission which would allow private companies to then sue these war powers for alleged crimes against their property. But it's kind of an interesting concept, right? But sure. But if you think about the Lehigh Valley Railroad, they had suffered a tremendous damage to their shipping ports. I mean, it was a

private company that suffered because of this international crisis. And, you know, and on top of it, they literally lost an island. The entire island was gone. So it was because of Lehigh that the investigation was reopened. They brought back Mr. Michael Kristof, who then became a leading suspect. Although, again, it's hard to know if he was like a

like a crafty actor who was like pulling the wool over these people's eyes, or if he was just maybe kind of a dense person and not a very intelligent person and they couldn't believe that he would have been part of this elaborate conspiracy. Mr. Kristoff was actually involved in this investigation even after his death.

In 1928, they actually went as far as exhuming his body from a Staten Island potter's field. And even here, and this is where it gets really mysterious and where maybe he was not exactly what he said he was. For when they exhumed his body, they discovered that the body held papers that matched Kristoff's name, but the dental records of this body did not match those of Michael Kristoff, leading some to believe that his death was faked.

That they had buried another person? That to escape and to lose his identity, that he took another body, said it was him, buried it under his name with his own papers, and then left town. Now, Lehi actually originally lost their case with the commission.

But it then was eventually reopened and stretched well into the 1930s. And it was around this particular time that we got the testimony of our Eastman girl, who began telling her stories of the mysterious Chelsea townhouse.

of Martha Held. They also retrieved the confession of a man named Paul Hilken, who was a man who lived in Baltimore and who was connected with the bribery scheme of bribing these guards. He was the paymaster for the German agents and had in fact paid the agents that were connected to the Black Tom explosion. Now with his cooperation, he actually was able to prove that he was part of this by delivering to the investigation

a magazine from 1917 that had penciled in payments to the various men that were responsible for the explosion. And the penciled in parts, I love this, were in invisible ink. They were in lemon juice and you could only read them when a heat was applied.

Just to add almost a cliche of sabotage at this point in the story. Wow, this tale just took an unexpected encyclopedia brown twist, Greg. Lemon juice. Yeah, I hope it didn't sour on you. Yeah, fuck.

I won't get into all the legal specifics because this thing drags all the way to the Supreme Court in 1941. So reaching all the way then to the Second World War. By the 1950s, even after the Second World War, the German government agreed to finally compensate the victims of the Black Tom explosion.

which even that then took an incredibly long time to complete this payment of $50 million. The final installment of the payment was paid as late as 1979. Wow. Well, what exists today of any of this? There are actually three places you can visit. So the first place is the actual site of Black Tom Island.

It is in the area of today's Liberty State Park in Jersey City. It's inside the park. It's in the park. Yeah. The southeastern part of the park. If you go there today, you'll find a small plaque that says, quote, you are walking on a site which saw one of the worst acts of terrorism in American history.

Now, the second place that you can visit, you can't go inside, of course, but 123 West 15th Street, that building is still there. That townhouse is still there, but it is radically redone on the front of it. It looks nothing like it would have back then. I believe that there's even a garage, which is an odd thing to have on a side street in Chelsea. But it shows no evidence of being the lair of a German opera diva.

Believe it or not, there's no marker or plaque that alerts us to the fact that a baroness had a parlor filled with German spies at that particular spot. And of course, the third site on this list that you can visit, that you can see is

is of course the Statue of Liberty, which suffered over $100,000 in damage because of the Black Tom explosion. But what you cannot see is the view that many before 1916 could have enjoyed from the Statue of Liberty, and that is the view from the torch. Oh, right, because the Statue of Liberty suffered injuries to her robe, right, and also to the torch and the flame. Right.

And as we hinted at the very first part of our show here, since 1916, since the Black Tom explosion, regular visitors have not been allowed to go visit the observation deck on the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

And it has been closed this whole time. It's been closed 100 years. 100 years. I mean, it's great. It's funny because when you see early pictures, there's clearly an observation deck where you can kind of walk around it. It looks a little frightening to me when you look at those photographs because you're so high in the air. But because of this disaster, regular visitors have not been allowed into the torch. But the crown is open.

The Crown has been closed, for instance, because of 9-11, but the Crown was reopened a few years ago. But not the Torch. But not the Torch. I mean, it's a much smaller space. It's much harder to secure. It's a smaller thing. And probably not up to code. Certainly not up to code. But it is here that you can find the lasting legacy of the Black Tom Explosion.

Join us on our website, BoweryBoysHistory.com, to see photos, illustrations, maps, and other stories about the explosion here on Black Tom Island. You can also join us on Twitter.

and join our growing communities on Facebook and on Instagram. And of course, we send big thanks and gratitude to our patrons and supporters who have joined us at patreon.com. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash Bowery Boys. Thank you so much for your support. It's because of you that we've been able to produce a new show every two weeks. So thank you very much for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not. See you real soon.

That was Danger in the Harbour from the Bowery Boys podcast, hosted by Greg Young and Tom Myers. If you liked it, you know the places to find more episodes. Cautionary Tales will return with a new story next week.

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