She and then husband
Dustin Hoffman once lived on West 11th Street in
Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The couple's anonymity was abruptly
shattered in March 1970 when the house next door exploded and caught
fire due to a gas leak. It wasn't long before the block was crawling
with fire engines, police cars, TV crews and reporters, most of whom
had more on their minds than the actual fire. Investigators shortly
discovered that the explosion was not caused by a gas leak as first
thought but actually by the accidental ignition of a stockpile of
weapons in the building next door. The radical group The Weather
Underground had been living there, preparing for their next attack. An
unusually-shaped window on the front of the building now memorializes
the explosion.
