October 5, 1950: The Day Brooklyn Thought the Bomb Had Dropped

Today in 1950 · Thursday, October 5, 1950

Trucks and horse-drawn carts jam Brooklyn's Wallabout Market, September 1940 — the workaday Brooklyn streetscape of the era

Trucks and horse-drawn carts jam Brooklyn's Wallabout Market, September 1940 — the workaday Brooklyn streetscape of the era · Al Aumuller, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Library of Congress, no known restrictions

On this day in 1950, the corner of Manhattan Avenue and Huron Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, blew up from below. A reinforced-concrete sewer exploded with enough force to hurl manhole covers three stories into the air across a three-block stretch, tear open a ten-foot section of pavement, and shatter some five hundred windows along the avenue.

What happened next says everything about the autumn of 1950. Five years into the atomic age, with war news on every front page, residents drew the obvious conclusion. 'The Russians dropped an atom bomb, we'll all be burned alive!' one woman cried, in an account preserved by Greenpoint historians, as families poured into the streets. The reality was found by city investigators: gasoline and oil fumes had seeped into the sewer and ignited. Astonishingly, only three people were slightly hurt.

The strangest part of the story took 28 years to surface. When the Coast Guard formally discovered the Greenpoint oil spill in 1978 — one of the largest in American history, an estimated 17 to 30 million gallons under the neighborhood — investigators looked back at the 1950 explosion and recognized it as the first warning. The bomb Brooklyn feared that day was imaginary; the slow disaster under its feet was real.

Also on this day

  • West Germans were permitted to charter civilian aircraft for the first time since the Second World War.
  • UN forces massed near the 38th parallel ahead of the drive into North Korea.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — its 13 straight weeks at No. 1 was the longest run of the 1950s. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: October opened with the season's front-runners — “My Blue Heaven” and “Sunset Boulevard” — still out front at the nation's box offices.
⚾ In sports: The World Series was underway — the Yankees taking a taut, low-scoring set from the Whiz Kids at Shibe Park and Yankee Stadium, capped by the Game 4 clincher this series covered on October 7.

Sources: Atlas Obscura: the Greenpoint sewer explosion · Greenpointers: day of terror in 1950 · Wikipedia: October 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Sports records: sabr.org. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from October 2026

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