Bomb Wrecks Store And Shakes Houses.

New York Times 100 years ago today, February 15, 1913:
Prince Street for a Block in Terror, with Every Window in Its Tenements Broken.
WILD STAMPEDE TO STREET
Tenants Jammed Together from Curb to Curb When Firemen Arrive and Quiet Panic.
    Residents of the tenements in the neighborhood of Prince and Elisabeth Streets were startled shortly after 11 o'clock last night by the report of an explosion so loud that it seemed to have occurred in each house. The buildings rocked also, and an instant later a deafening din arose as men, women and children, gathering a few belongings into their arms, rushed for the sidewalk.
    From every tenement in Prince Street, between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery, and from tenements, even so far as a block or more away, the tenants rushed, screaming with fright. Some of them fled to the fire escapes, certain that there had been an earthquake and that their homes were on fire. Someone sent in a fire alarm.
    The first firemen to enter Prince Street found the thoroughfare blocked with persons from curb to curb. Hundreds of others clung to fire escapes, and the firemen, seeing at once that a bomb explosion had caused all the trouble, and that there was no fire, ran about shouting to the terrified Italians to get back into their flats. It was many minutes, however, before the panic was quieted.
    Then a survey of the damage showed that every window in every tenement in Prince Street, in the block between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery, had been broken. Broken glass lay in the street like ice. In some places it was an inch deep. The plate glass windows of nine stores were blown out and in the debris were parts of door jambs and bits of window framing. The front of the tenement at 12 Prince Street was worst damaged.
    It was in the doorway of Giuseppi Scozzari's grocery store, on the ground floor of this building, that a bomb had been placed. The store was wrecked. Two kittens, which had been inside, were killed. Scozzari, though he would not admit it last night, had told Policeman Pellegrino or the Mulberry Street Station frequently in the past that he had received Black Hand letters. The police are sure the bomb was aimed to damage him.
    How it was placed in the doorway the police could not learn. They found Sam Schilder of 75 Chrystie Street, who said he had passed the building on his way home from the Subway just before the explosion. He said there had been two men walking ahead of him, but he was quite sure they had not stopped to place the bomb. He had noticed it, he said, but had mistaken it for a bundle of rags and had passed on.
    Schilder was only a few feet from the building when the explosion came and he and the two men ahead of him were thrown from their feet and almost instantly covered with a shower of broken glass. The other men picked themselves up and ran but Schilder waited to see what had happened.
    The police of the Mulberry Street Station whence the reserves were called to quiet the panic-stricken crowds, said it was the worst bomb explosion they had ever seen and bomb explosions have been frequent in the district within the confines of the Mulberry Street precinct.