The Marine Midland Bombing

On the night of August 20, 1969, a bomb built with roughly the force of 25 sticks of dynamite went off on the eighth floor of the Marine Midland Bank Building at 140 Broadway in the Financial District. It tore through a hallway near the elevators, blew out windows on three sides of the tower, and injured twenty night-shift workers in the bank's stock bookkeeping department next door. The man behind it was Sam Melville, a former draftsman turned radical who saw corporate towers and government buildings as targets in a private war against the Vietnam War and American power. It was one of eight bombings he set off across New York that year. He was arrested that November, pleaded guilty, and got eighteen years. He never served most of it: two years later he died in the Attica uprising, shot by state police.