THIS OLD HOUSE.(Column)

At midday on March 6, 1970, Charles Lockwood, a senior at Princeton, and his friend Robert Mayer, a photographer, were taking pictures of a particularly fine Greek Revival doorway on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village for Lockwood's undergraduate thesis on the history of New York row houses (three-to-five-story attached dwellings of brick or brownstone, most of them built in the nineteenth century). Their work was interrupted by an explosion at the Fifth Avenue end of the block followed by a terrific shock wave. Quickly deciding to document whatever disaster had taken place, they ran toward the flames and debris spewing from No. 18, shot a roll of film, and brought ...