A protest art collective’s call preceded a coordinated multi-bomb attack on Rockefeller-linked skyscrapers

Evidence

Crazy George returns from Chicago, where he’d been furnishing evidence for the upcoming conspiracy trial. Melville phones him with news that Something Really Big is about to happen and indeed, just after 1:00 a.m., Tuesday, November 10, the evening after GAAG issued “A Call for the Immediate Resignation of all the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of Museum of Modern Art,” three bombs in three office skyscrapers detonate in rapid succession. The first decimates the twentieth floor of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. The second caves nineteenth-floor walls at the new glass and marble General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Ninth Street. The third, downtown, wrecks three floors of Chase Manhattan’s sixty-story headquarters on Liberty Street. (A fourth bomb found at the studios of WMCA radio fails to detonate.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1488

Categorization

• SHARE: Someone interested in the GAAG/MoMA story or NYC radical history would enjoy the precise mechanics of this November 1969 bombing spree targeting Rockefeller-linked corporate towers.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s shelf on why culture stagnates: the avant-garde here is inseparable from direct political sabotage, an illegality that later gentrification-era art scenes lack.