Obviously it’s not the townhouse, because that one done exploded. From the Manhattan real estate listings of The Corcoran Group. As far as home for sale listings go, this one, written up by Kim Velsey, is almost poetry:

The Weathermen may not have changed society, but they certainly radicalized 18 West 11th Street. In 1970, the elegant Greenwich Village townhouse was destroyed during the radical group’s botched bomb-making attempt in the house’s basement.

Rising in the place of the Greek Revival townhouse is a somewhat oddball structure that subtly reference the home’s violent history, built in 1978 by architect Hugh Hardy and Steuben Glass executive Francis Mason. It has belonged to the Langworthy family—who famously kept a Paddington bear with a frequently-changing wardrobe in the front window (he’s now wearing a Corcoran t-shirt)—since its construction. Now listed for $10.9 million with Corcoran brokers Sara Gelbard and Paul Kolbusz, the home is certainly a “one-of-a-kind home” as the listing, which was also spotted by Curbed, boasts.

It was here that trust fund revolutionary Cathy Wilkerson grew up. But rather than turn her back on her privileged background, she decided to use it to her advantage, asking her parents if she could use the place while they vacationed in St. Kitts. They probably expected to come back to find the carpet a little worse for the wear, rather than returning to find no house at all.

The radical group was building nail-and-dynamite pipe bombs that were to be used to destroy property, including the Columbia library, when one accidentally detonated, instantly killing the three people in the basement.

Wilkerson and her friend Kathy Boudin, who were upstairs at the time, managed to escape, and as described in the wonderfully detailed story published in The Times, came running out of the house covered in soot, mostly naked, their clothes having been torn off in the blast. After showering at a neighbors’ house, they fled, and did not resurface until years later.

So what’s the new place like? It bears little resemblance to the three other Greek Revival townhouse that Henry Brevoort Jr. built for his children in the mid-1800s, but it’s certainly more interesting. Designed around an open central staircase, the home also has an elevator, dumbwaiter, three bedrooms and a private guest suite with a full-kitchen.

Light banishes the ghosts of the past, streaming in through big picture windows and a central skylight. Distorted angles and open spaces abound, allowing for great views of the leafy street. There’s also a south-facing garden and a 45-year-old Japanese Katsura tree.

And, looking on the bright side, among the residents who lived happy lives at 18 West 11th Street: Merrill-Lynch co-founder Charles Merrill, his son, the poet James Merrill and Broadway lyricist and movie executive Howard Dietz.

I’ve waklked past that building hundreds, maybe thousands of times without ever suspecting what happened on the site.

Thank you Glen E. Friedman!

 
The reaction to the post yesterday about Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and the radical right’s violent rhetoric coming back to haunt them was an interesting thread to wake up to this morning. Thank you to (almost) everyone who contributed. A few observations:

First of all, my point, in case anyone didn’t get it, was contained in the bold text (”...the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.”). I’m saying that the potential for a blowback against the folks propagating the majority of this hate talk is rather ripe. If you piss in the wind, don’t be surprised when it comes back to hit you in the face. Then poor Eric Fuller went and proved my point about 3 hours later, to his shame. His story is the very embodiment of my argument in the post. The guy should have been arrested, but it’s sad

I hardly see any evidence there of a “full-throated, hate-filled rant,” either, as I was accused of in the comments by “Metzger’s id,” someone who obviously did not read what I actually wrote. (Steve Doocey IS one of the stupidest people on television. He’s a fucking idiot and I will not back down from this position).

Commenter moflcky scores when he asks “Do you think it’s worse now than it was in the 60s/70s with SDS, the Weather Underground, the SLA, the Black Panthers, the Klan and the race riots?”

This is a very good point and worth thinking about. However, I think contrasting the difference of then vs today is best served by comparing *the media* that exists today vs. what we had at that time. With just three TV networks, I think the center could hold very easily back then. In the realm of “public opinion” it was much easier to achieve a broad general agreement 40-50 years ago and so there was, by and large, a very strong “centrist” majority. The GOP of Nixon’s era has very little to do with the GOP of today, they’ve moved far, far to the right of the positions they held in the 70s. And the Democrats of today are pretty much standing in the same place, ideologically speaking, as most of the Republicans were at that time. Nixon, it can be argued, was to the left of Bill Clinton, in many respects.

The political elites of both parties moved significantly to the right in the past 40 years, even if the general public did not. As the politicians shifted rightwards, the population, or some of the population, anyway, reacted by going in the other direction and eventually—sometime in the 90s—modern progressive politics is born (just as the Great Society and Roe vs. Wade saw an awakening of the religious right/Moral Majority as a political force in the late 70s).

You could say it was “the dialectic” or “zeitgeist” in motion or even just a “generation gap”—I refer you to Spiral Dynamics or the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe. I think both get it right. The generation up and coming looks at the Tea party and largely sees a bunch of ignorant, cranky old white people. As the younger citizens of the United States grow up, the folks who are attending these Tea party rallies will be dying off.  And as they do, something else will happen that no one can anticipate at the present time. That’s just the way it works.

The Weather Underground didn’t get face time to argue their beliefs on MSNBC in 1970, although admittedly they might today, depending on the ratings potential. I don’t think they had ANY influence on the general public. The same cannot be said of the radical right Tea party-types and folks like Tony Perkins, Bryan Fisher, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and the rest of them.

There is a huge chasm between some misguided grad students who most people were appalled by, and few supported, and an obviously doomed Republican Senate candidate telling her supporters that if they don’t win at the ballot box, they’ll win with guns? This isn’t some group of hippies who appear to be freaks to 99% of the population talking, this is a lemon-faced church lady-type who faced off against the Senate Majority leader and raised a record amount of cash (most from from outside of her state).

William Ayers was brought up in the comments. I find bringing up Bill Ayers, specifically, in this context (and nearly all others) to be utterly meaningless and tiresome. How is he relevant in 2011 or is this situation comparable? Can someone please remind me?. I’ll say it again: the biggest difference between the Weather Underground in 1969 and the Tea party in 2011 is that the Weather Underground never had their own cable news outlet (The Weather Channel?) and 15% of the dumbest and least educated portion of the population did NOT follow or sympathize with their ideals.

Imagine the Democrats were running Bernardine Dohrn for the Senate? Wouldn’t THAT would be the flip-side of the GOP running Sharron Angle? WHO is the equivalent to Sharron Angle on the mainstream Left? (There is NO nuance in advocating “Second Amendment remedies! It’s not a statement open to that much wiggle room in the interpretation!)

Make no mistake about it, this is what MORE THAN HALF of the country is hearing when we have to listen to this Tea party bullshit: These folks want MINORITY RULE.

They will not get it, obviously, without violence.