July 30, 1916: The Night the Garden State Exploded and the Statue of Liberty was Nearly Destroyed

    Just after midnight on July 30, 1916 Jersey City firefighters responded to reports of a series of small fires burning along the piers on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor.

Black Tom is an artificially created island that is located on the New Jersey side of the harbor adjacent to Ellis and Liberty Islands.  

Originally, Black Tom had simply been the name given by sailors to a large rock that had stood out above the waterline in New York Harbor.  This rock had become infamous because of the hazards it posed to ships trying to enter and exit Manhattan.

For that reason, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the space surrounding Black Tom had begun to be used for dumping refuse and garbage from New York City.  Within the space of only a few years an artificial island was created by all of this landfill and prior to the turn of the twentieth century a railroad was constructed that connected Black Tom Island to mainland New Jersey.  Following the construction of the railroad Black Tom Island was annexed to Jersey City.

In 1915, as the First World War raged across Europe, the municipality of  Jersey City leased use of Black Tom Island to the United States Navy,  Although the United States would not formally enter World War One until April 26, 1917, both American sentiment and economic might largely supported the allied powers of Britain and France throughout the duration of the war from 1914 to 1918.

During the first three years of the war, the United States government in conjunction with American munitions manufacturers, made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling and exporting billions of tons of bullets, artillery shells and high explosives to the allied powers of Britain, France and Russia.

At the beginning of 1915 the British Royal Navy enacted a crippling blockade of Germany which severely curtailed the German’s ability to continue their war effort.  The British blockade, in conjunction with a seemingly endless stream of American manufactured supplies, meant that despite holding its own on the battlefield, Germany was slowly losing the economic war of materiel. 

Despite the fact that, technically, the United States was still a neutral power in the summer of 1916, German military leaders were enraged by the almost limitless amount of supplies that Britain and France could draw upon as a result of American economic support.  For that reason, in the summer of 1916, members of German Naval Intelligence in conjunction with secret agents already planted in New York City, began to plot one of the most audacious and destructive acts of sabotage ever committed on American soil.

        By the night of July 30, 1916 Black Tom Island in New York Harbor was one of the largest munitions depots in the United States.

At that moment there are over two million tons of munitions and high explosives being stored on Black Tom Island.  All of this weaponry is either being held in freight cars on the island itself or is located on barges moored along the piers of the island.  Strangely enough, other than a dozen or so security guards who periodically patrol the island, Black Tom is almost completely unguarded.

In spite of their best efforts, the firefighters of the Jersey City Fire Department in conjunction with a handful of naval personnel, are unable to contain the multiple small fires on the island which seem to be multiplying and popping up everywhere.  Within a few hours the fires are beginning to blaze out of control.

Then at around 2 a.m. an enormous explosion, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in the history of the world, rocks Black Tom Island.  It is estimated that upwards of fifty tons of TNT detonated in an instant causing a shockwave that registered on the Richter Scale as a magnitude 5.0 earthquake.

The force of the blast incinerates firefighters near its epicenter and it throws others literally out of their boots and hundreds of feet into the air.  People in bed as far away as Baltimore are awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the explosion.  The sky above Jersey City glows bright orange from the burning flames and can be seen up to one hundred miles away.

Fragments of red hot shrapnel fly off of the island and lodge themselves in the torch of the Statue of Liberty.  Lady Liberty is so severely damaged by the Black Tom explosion that her torch will not reopen to visitors again until after major renovations are conducted in 1984 almost seventy years after the attack.

Tens of thousands of windows are shattered in lower Manhattan.  Times Square is covered by broken glass and a layer of ash on the morning after the attack.  Shrapnel and exploding artillery shells rain down on Journal Square in Jersey City over a mile away as if New Jersey itself is being bombarded by a hostile enemy.

    In total twenty million dollars worth of property damage will be caused by the Black Tom explosion--nearly half a billion dollars worth of damage in today’s money.  To this day it remains unknown how many people were actually killed as a direct result of the act of sabotage committed on Black Tom Island, but the body count could number in the dozens.

Today there is a plaque in Liberty State Park that serves as a memorial to those killed by the Black Tom explosion.  It reads:

“On July 30, 1916 the Black Tom munitions depot exploded rocking New York Harbor and sending residents tumbling from their beds.  The noise of the explosion was heard as far away as Maryland and Connecticut.  Shrapnel pierced the Statue of Liberty...it is not known how many died.  According to historians the Germans sabotaged the munitions depot in order to stop deliveries being made to the British who had blockaded Germany.  You are walking on a site which saw one of the worst acts of terrorism in American history.”

In 1916, when it came to investigating any crime or suspicious activity, there was no federal agency or intelligence gathering institution dedicated to the task.  So at first, local police from both New York City and New Jersey believed that, perhaps, the explosion had been the result of some sort of accidental fire.  But after questioning nearly everyone in any way connected with Black Tom Island, suspicion soon began to fall on a young Slovakian immigrant named Michael Kristoff who had worked on Black Tom Island.

Eventually, under interrogation, Kristoff admitted to working for German agents in 1915 and 1916 by having transported packages and suitcases for them, though he denied having any knowledge of their contents, but he did admit that he suspected that two of the security guards on Black Tom Island were in fact German agents though he couldn’t name anyone for sure.

With Kristoff’s, lead members of the NYPD and other local law enforcement agencies were able to discover the existence of a local German spy and saboteur ring that had most probably been behind the Black Tom Explosion.  They deduced, probably quite accurately, that the explosion had been detonated through the use of small cigar shaped bombs that had been placed on the island during the night of July 29-30, 1916 based on the fact that similar methods and devices had been used in other known German acts of sabotage committed both in Europe and the United States during the war.

However, at the time, due to the lack of any national intelligence gathering or law enforcement agency in the United States, it was impossible for local authorities to bring charges against any suspects since they were unable to trace the Black Tom Island explosion back to any specific individuals.  Even Kristoff himself was released from police custody after questioning and would later go on to serve in the United States Army during the final year of the First World War in 1918.

If anything, the explosion on Black Tom Island and the terror it caused, proved to Americans the need for federalization when it came to law enforcement and intelligence gathering.  This act of German sabotage highlighted the fact that intelligence and information gathering needed to be centralized at the highest levels of government so that it could be acted upon quickly and effectively.  Unfortunately, as with most things in history, the lesson taught to us by the Black Tom Island explosion of July 30, 1916 is one we all too often still forget.