The pipe bomb was small as pipe bombs go, but the explosion could be heard from several blocks away—a sharp bang as rows of factory-fresh ceramic tiles shattered into a pile of razor-edged rubble. Neighbors who were drifting off to sleep sat upright, awake. Family members who were preparing for bed looked at each other first with questions, then with certainty that they had the answer. “I guess somebody is trying to blow up the new housing,” one man joked to his wife. But it wasn’t a joke. That’s exactly what someone was trying to do.
Everyone heard the bang, but only one person called the police. The dispatcher decided it was an electrical transformer problem, so there were no sirens, no searches in the night. The next morning, crews of workmen arrived at the sprawling site, which had once been the overgrown ball fields of an abandoned school, and which now held the nearly finished shells of forty-eight cream-and lemon-colored townhouses. Seeing the damage, they, too, called the police, who quickly rimmed the area in yellow and black tape, and searched the wounded building for clues.
Soon the FBI was there, and the Federal Marshal’s Office. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The Westchester County Bomb Squad. The director of the Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority. Assorted politicians who came to say “I told you so.” The roads at the site were not yet paved, so each arriving official had to walk through the deep red mud to what, on the architect’s models, was intended to be a tiny front lawn. They stood in the dirt outside. Apartment 120, relieved to see the townhouse was still standing.
The pipe bomb had been placed on the outer windowsill of a ground-floor bathroom, where the final grouting had been laid only days before. The window was blown out, the sill was charred and destroyed, the tiles on the floors and walls were shattered, and a mirrored door of the medicine cabinet was knocked from its hinges. Parts of the bomb were found a hundred feet away. Most chilling, however, was not the damage done, but the damage that could have been. Less than four feet from the windowsill was an open gas line. It was not working. But there was no way for the bomber to know that.
The crowd grew, as it always does in Yonkers. Some of the onlookers were nearby homeowners who had heard the explosion the night before. Others were just curious, drawn by the flashing emergency lights. They hadn’t wanted these buildings from the start—hadn’t wanted to be part of this court-concocted experiment in social history. A few were, not so secretly, glad about the bomb. Maybe it would do what their years of protests couldn’t and cause the housing literally to crumble. And yet, it was hope all but extinguished by fear. Any impulse to gloat was stemmed by the stark reality of a bomb, just blocks away from their homes.
Eventually, the work crews took a break for lunch. But everyone else stayed for most of the day. The authorities, searching. The politicians, talking. And the neighbors standing, staring, from behind the double-height security fence.