After 1920 Blast, The Opposite Of 'Never Forget'; No Memorials on Wall St. For Attack That Killed 30

On the block where it happened, there were no ''we will never forget'' speeches, no candles or bronze plaques bolted to the wall that has never been repaired. All that was there yesterday was the noontime crowd, swirling by with lunch to be gulped, errands to be run and an afternoon of work waiting to be done. In other words, no one was paying much attention.

That was pretty much what the noontime crowd was doing on Sept. 16, 1920 -- 83 years ago yesterday -- when a bomb exploded there. And that was why, after the dead had been taken to the morgue and the injured to hospitals on that Thursday afternoon, there were so many descriptions of the bomb-laden cart that had been parked beneath a window of the J. P. Morgan & Company bank headquarters at 23 Wall Street.

In the aftermath, there were questions: What had the horse looked like? What had been painted on the cart? Some witnesses recalled the letters ''D,'' ''N'' and ''T,'' others the word ''dynamite,'' others the word ''DuPont.'' And what color was the smoke, anyway? Black, from dynamite? Yellow, from nitrogylcerine? Blue, from some other explosive? Among witnesses who survived the devastating hail of metal and glass, there was no consensus.

But the damage was clear. The fortresslike facade of the Morgan building was pocked with craters that remain deep enough to sink a palm into. The columns of what is now Federal Hall, across the street, were blackened. More than 30 people were killed and several hundred wounded, and the damage exceeded $2 million -- more than $18.4 million in 2003 dollars.

''The number of victims, large though it was, cannot convey the extent of the inferno produced by the explosion, the worst of its kind in American history,'' Paul Avrich, a professor of history at Queens College, wrote in reviewing the case more than a decade ago.

The investigators sniffing for clues long ago went from being detectives to historians. The police never charged anyone in the bombing, and it is a mostly forgotten moment in New York City history.

''Nobody remembers,'' said Beverly Gage, whose book ''The Wall Street Explosion: Capitalism, Terrorism and the 1920 Bombing of New York,'' is to be published next year by Oxford University Press.

One reason is the speed with which the attack went from rating a banner headline to barely rating a footnote. ''Wall Street's Wall Street,'' said Meg Ventrudo, the assistant director of the Museum of American Financial History. ''Wall Street is more concerned with tomorrow's trades than yesterday's news.''

And as Ms. Gage noted, ''The Morgan bank from the first was rather self-conscious about wanting to get the whole thing over with and forgotten because it wasn't terribly good for business.''

Within a few years, the bombing was hardly talked about on the street. ''There was an article in 1925 or 1926 that I found in The Wall Street Journal, a reporter going down to see what's going on on the anniversary,'' Ms. Gage said. ''People kind of remembered, but he found stenographers standing around who didn't recall the event.''

So, like the passers-by yesterday, they did not remember what Ms. Gage described as the silence that followed the explosion -- two full seconds of quiet just around the corner from the noise of the New York Stock Exchange. By some accounts, the bells at Trinity Church were still tolling 12 o'clock when the bomb went off. A moment later, the shower of glass began -- chunks of glass from windows that had been knocked out by the force of the explosion or by shrapnel hurled in all directions. Some historians speculate that the ramshackle wagon left at the curb was loaded with dynamite and cast-iron springs, or perhaps steel window-casings.

The authorities were on the case until the late 1930's. Ms. Gage said one theory was that it was an accident -- the cart part of a thriving underground trade in dynamite during the building boom that followed World War I. ''There were interviews saying, 'You always see carts of explosives going through this neighborhood and I always think, how dangerous,' '' she explained.

But the police believed the bomb had been set by Italian anarchists or Communists. In ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background'' (Princeton University Press, 1991), Professor Avrich of Queens College argued that the cart had been rigged with explosives and a timer and ridden to its parking place by an angry anarchist named Mario Buda. He was upset, Professor Avrich wrote, by the indictment of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for a shoe-factory robbery in Massachusetts in which two people were killed.

If Buda was indeed lashing out at American capitalism, he missed the most famous of its figures. As Professor Avrich noted, J. P. Morgan Jr. was traveling in Europe. The principal victims were messengers and clerks. Buda eventually sailed for Italy, where he died in 1963. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927.

Yesterday's anniversary went unnoticed across from the Morgan building -- itself now empty -- in what was a Treasury Department building in 1920 and is now a gym. It went unnoticed in a building up the block that bears Donald J. Trump's last name in big, shiny letters. It went unnoticed by people talking on their cellphones, and by a man selling pictures of the World Trade Center and playing cards picturing Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders from a table on the sidewalk.

It would have gone unnoticed by four firefighters who had been dispatched to the building next door, until a reporter told them the story.

Lt. Niels Jorgenson, 35, was clearly moved. ''People of my generation would never know the significance of what took place because there's nothing to memorialize the event,'' he said, ''and that's a shame.''

Then two lawyers, Kipp C. Leland and Hewson Chen, arrived. Mr. Leland had read about the bombing on the Web, and wanted Mr. Chen to see the damage. ''Morgan's on the record as saying they'll never repair the damage,'' Mr. Leland said.

Mr. Chen said: ''It looks like acid rain damage. The average Joe walking by will be like, 'What a ratty building.' ''

Photos: At noon on Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb exploded in front of the J.P. Morgan & Company bank headquarters on Wall Street. At left, the front wall of the building, deliberately left unrepaired, still bears the scars. (Photo by The New York Times); (Photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)