A City Room post recently about a town house on the Upper East Side that blew up in 2006 brought to mind another town house, another era and another explosion — the town house in Greenwich Village that became a bomb factory for the radical group the Weathermen.

Unlike with the physician on the Upper East Side who apparently intended to destroy his town house, the explosion on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, in 1970, was an accident.

Charles Lockwood remembers how loud it was. He was down the street, taking pictures.

He was a senior at Princeton. He and a classmate with a new camera had driven to Manhattan to take photographs for Mr. Lockwood’s senior thesis. It served as the basis for his book “Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House,” published in 1972 and reissued by Rizzoli in 2003....