Battle of Los Angeles
For days Jim McNamara had been casing “The Fortress,” as Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Otis referred to the industrial complex in downtown Los Angeles that housed and printed his newspaper. Otis, a bellicose Civil War veteran who liked to go by “General,” called his employees “The Phalanx” and his Mission Revival mansion “The Bivouac.” Once a staunch union man but now fiercely conservative, Otis was doing his best to keep unions out of a town he thought of as his.
McNamara had come to change that.
A breezeway called Ink Alley connected the Times editorial offices with the paper’s printing plant. At all hours, typesetters, pressmen, reporters, and laborers streamed through the open-air passage, which also served as an informal lunchroom and storage for barrels of ink, a volatile substance. A little after 5 p.m. on Friday, September 30, 1910, McNamara, 28, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and hawk-nosed above a drooping mustache, walked off Spring Street into the breezeway. He was carrying a workingman’s satchel that he stowed behind a row of barrels. McNamara walked back out to Spring Street, where electric lights blared the Times motto, “All the news, all the time.” He had until 1 a.m. to make two more deliveries, after which he was to catch a train to San Francisco, 500 miles north.
Around midnight, at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Park View Street, McNamara, carrying a valise, was behind a hedge at The Bivouac. He opened the suitcase. Inside lay 16 sticks of dynamite cushioned in sawdust. Wires snaked from the TNT to a battery connected to a wind-up clock. McNamara cranked the timepiece and latched the bag. He had one more stop, about 15 blocks away: 830 Garland Avenue, home of Felix Zeehandelaar, secretary of the Los Angeles Merchants & Manufacturer’s Association. Once done there, McNamara caught his northbound train.
That evening, some of the 100-plus workers in the three-story Fortress complained of smelling natural gas—not odd; gas jets lit most of the complex, and complaints of
