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The house at 18 West 11th Street is one of Greenwich Village’s most famous. It has been a home to literary and Broadway royalty, the site of a deadly accidental bombing by Weatherman radicals and, once rebuilt, a sweet neighborhood fixture with a stuffed Paddington Bear wearing seasonal outfits in its angled picture window.
Now, in its latest incarnation, it will be home to a young financier who is planning an extensive reconstruction and a penthouse while retaining the notched and jutting facade narrowly approved almost 40 years ago by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Not that he is looking for attention, especially since the site still draws enigmatic tributes on the anniversary of the March 6, 1970, explosion.
“The house is not a monument to a historic event,” said the new owner, Justin Korsant of Long Light Capital, who bought it in December for $9.25 million. He agreed to speak publicly for the first time since the real estate website The Real Deal in January identified him as the buyer unnamed in sale records.
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“The history is not what drew me to it,” he said. Mr. Korsant declined to give his age, but noted that he was not yet born at the time of the explosion that leveled the house.
Mr. Korsant, whose father was president of the Ziff Corporation, a publishing company, and whose grandfather created the sunburn treatment Solarcaine, said he had relatives on the block. Though currently a bachelor, Mr. Korsant said he looked forward to someday raising a family in a house of striking contemporary redesign (“glassy but not too glassy,” in the words of one of its architects).
The original homesite, amid a row of Federal townhouses built in the 1840s by Henry Brevoort Jr., was once owned by Charles E. Merrill, a founder of Merrill Lynch & Company, and father of the poet James Merrill.
In 1930, the house was sold to the Broadway lyricist and movie publicist Howard Dietz (he devised the roaring lion mascot for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), who staged lavish parties.
In 1963 an advertising executive, James Wilkerson, bought it. In early 1970, as he was leaving for a Caribbean vacation, his daughter Cathlyn, pleading the flu, asked for the house keys, as she recalled in her 2007 memoir, “Flying Close to the Sun.” At Swarthmore she had joined the Students for a Democratic Society and then embraced armed struggle against the Vietnam War with the group’s militant offshoot, Weatherman.
She and four comrades — Katherine Boudin, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins and Ted Gold — moved in with dynamite to assemble nail bombs for targets including an officer’s club in Fort Dix, N.J.
Ms. Wilkerson was ironing the sheets and Ms. Boudin was in the shower when a shock wave erupted from the basement. The two women staggered out of the rubble to a neighbor’s house for clothes before vanishing into the Weather Underground. The other three died in the blast.
Ms. Wilkerson surrendered in 1980 and served 11 months of a three-year sentence. Ms. Boudin spent 20 years in prison for a 1981 shootout in an armored car robbery that killed a guard and two police officers.
The cleared lot was purchased by the architect Hugh Hardy and an associate who planned, but never built, an unusual northeast-facing, angle-fronted townhouse that narrowly won city approval. In 1978, they sold the land to a wealthy Philadelphia couple who agreed to employ the distinct design.
The couple — David Langworthy, a metals magnate, and his wife, Norma, who had danced with Gene Kelly and produced shows on and off Broadway — had the house built with special steel supports because a previous home of theirs on the Main Line in Philadelphia had burned to the ground in a lightning strike, said their son Keith, a financial adviser.
Ms. Langworthy, who was an heiress to a fortune from her maternal grandfather, Wilson R. Neckerman, the inventor of a highway restroom pay-toilet lock, died at age 92 in 2012. After her death, the house was sold to Mr. Korsant, who is using the successor to Mr. Hardy’s firm, H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, for his renovations.
Listed as five stories, the house was built split, with the front and rear on different levels, 10 in all. The reconstruction, to begin shortly and take perhaps a year or more, will create flat floors, with six bedrooms and seven baths, the firm said.
Neighbors say offerings often appear there around March 6. “Usually flowers,” said Art Levin, who lives next door at No. 20 and narrowly escaped injury in the bombing, along with a former renter at No. 16, the actor Dustin Hoffman.
One recent visitor, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson, a historian from Colorado and a classmate of Ms. Wilkerson’s at Swarthmore, was surprised in March to find the front steps strewn with two dimes, 18 pennies and a Brazilian 5 centimes piece.
Bill Ayers, a Weatherman founder who later became an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he often visited and left tributes, although not this year.
“For me, March 6 never passes,” he said by phone from Chicago. “For all of us who were part of it, it’s particularly very important to me we don’t forget our friends.” That, he said, included “the intensity and mistakes made.”
Mr. Ayers married Bernardine Dohrn, another former Weatherman leader, and with her raised Ms. Boudin’s son when she was in prison.
Ms. Wilkerson, a math teacher in Brooklyn with a grown daughter, said she was not one of the annual commemorators. “It’s not my circle,” she said. Ms. Boudin, now an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, declined to comment.
Last Monday the top stoop still held a dime and 10 pennies. And the figure in Ms. Langworthy’s picture window remained unchanged — Paddington Bear, in a Santa outfit.
Correction: June 12, 2014
An article on Monday about the owners of a house on West 11th Street in Manhattan that was rebuilt after being destroyed in a 1970 accidental bombing by members of Weather Underground misspelled the given name of one of the movement’s leaders. She is Bernardine Dohrn, not Bernadine.
The 1983 Beirut barracks bombings were attacks that occurred on October 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon, during the Lebanese Civil War when two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) peacekeepers, specifically against United States and French service members, killing 241 U.S. and 58 French peacekeepers, 6 civilians, and the 2 suicide attackers. An obscure group calling itself 'Islamic Jihad' claimed responsibility for the bombings and that the bombings were aimed to get the MNF out of Lebanon.[1]
The chain of command likely ran from the government of Iran; to Iran's Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, located in Damascus; to Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Dehghan in Beirut as the Iranians drew on assets in Lebanon.[2]Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria have continued to deny any involvement in any of the bombings, even though the Iranian government erected a monument in Tehran to commemorate the 1983 bombings and its "martyrs" in 2004.[3]
Two suicide bombers detonated each of the truck bombs. In the attack on the building serving as a barracks for the 1st Battalion 8th Marines (Battalion Landing Team - BLT 1/8), in the death toll were 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers, making this incident the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since World War II's Battle of Iwo Jima, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Armed Forces since the first day of the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, the deadliest single terrorist attack on American citizens in general prior to the September 11 attacks, and the deadliest single terrorist attack on American citizens overseas.[4] Another 128 Americans were wounded in the blast. Thirteen later died of their injuries, and they are numbered among the total number who died.[5] An elderly Lebanese man, a custodian/vendor who was known to work and sleep in his concession stand next to the building, was also killed in the first blast.[6][7][8] The explosives used were later estimated to be equivalent to as much as 9,500 kg (21,000 pounds) of TNT.[9][10]
In the attack on the French barracks, the nine-story 'Drakkar' building, 55 paratroopers from the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment and three paratroopers of the 9th Parachute Chasseur Regiment were killed and 15 injured by a second truck bomb. This attack occurred just minutes after the attack on the American Marines. It was France's single worst military loss since the end of the Algerian War.[11] The wife and four children of a Lebanese janitor at the French building were also killed, and more than twenty other Lebanese civilians were injured.[12]
These attacks eventually led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, where they had been stationed since the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Contents
Beirut: June 1982 to October 1983
Timeline[13]
- 6 June 1982 -- Israel invaded Lebanon: Operation "Peace for Galilee."
- 23 August 1982 -- Bachir Gemayel was elected to be Lebanon's president.
- 25 August 1982 -- A MNF of approximately 400 French, 800 Italian soldiers and 800 Marines of the 32d Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) were deployed in Beirut as part of a peacekeeping force to oversee the evacuation of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas.
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