The House on 11th Street

NEW YORK's West 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is a gracious, tree-shaded reminder of the Greenwich Village of Henry James. A community of successful artists, writers and businessmen, it is lined with stately town houses like the four-story dwelling at No. 18, which until last week looked much the same as when it was built in 1845. There was a formal garden in back where few sounds louder than the tinkling of teacups were ever heard. The owner of the Federal-style $250,000 house, Businessman James Platt Wilkerson, had furnished the interior Georgian style. The rooms were filled with art and rare antiques, including a 1790 square piano. Wilkerson was especially proud of his paneled library, called the Bird Room because it housed a collection of wood, metal and china birds. It was a site for refined, elegant living.

Now No. 18 is a tangle of ground-level debris. Behind its fac,ade of gentility, the house had become a laboratory of violence, its products designed to destroy the stable society that its elegance symbolized. When three explosions shattered the dwelling, Wilkerson's daughter Cathlyn, 25, and an unidentified young woman emerged dazed and trembling from the crumbling, burning ruins. Having donned a neighbor's old clothes, the pair disappeared before police came. At the end of last week, they were still missing. sb In the ruins, police found 60 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting caps and four dynamite-packed pipes wrapped with heavy nails that could act as flesh-shredding shrapnel. They also found the body of Theodore Gold, 23, and the unidentified remains of two other persons. A credit card belonging to Kathy Boudin, 26, who may have been the person with Cathlyn, also turned up in the debris. Gold and the girls were all members of the violent Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. Police speculated that, while Wilkerson and his wife were vacationing in the Caribbean, the amateurs had turned the basement into a bomb factory.

The bright, attractive children of moderately wealthy families, the youngsters were unlikely by normal standards to have ended up as bombers. But in college they had turned away from traditional values and become increasingly radicalized. Though the pretty, brown-haired Miss Wilkerson attended the best of private schools and Swarthmore College, she seemed also lonely and unsure of herself. "Every time I think of something to explain Cathy," said her mother, who is divorced from Cathy's father (both have remarried), "I think of something that contradicts it. She didn't think much of herself. And she could develop a deep and fierce loyalty to things."

Bearded Ted Gold was the son of two physicians; his father, Hyman, is known as "the Movement Doctor" for his free treatment of penniless radicals. Gold was a bright, committed student in New York's Stuyvesant High, where a former teacher, Bernard Flicker, recalls: "He had everything--wit, charm. He could have been anything." At Columbia University, Gold began as a moderate leftist, working for civil rights and antiwar causes. But he moved further toward the fringe, Flicker says, and "began to feel that protests did no good, that nothing could change. In the end, he took the view that any means to an end was legitimate." sb

Kathy Boudin was destined to be a crusader. Her father Leonard is a prominent lawyer for leftist causes. She was a magna cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr. Her mother recalls: "Kathy did everything cum laude." Kathy's parents have refused to cooperate with police in their search for her, and her mother says only: "We know she is safe."

The three moved to the Weatherman organization after S.D.S. split up in a factional dispute in 1969. All had several scrapes with the law. Last year the girls were among 26 women who "raided" a Pittsburgh high school. By then, their upper-class breeding was wearing thin; some of the girls ran through the corridors barebreasted, yelling "Jail-break!" The girls were also arrested during the violent Weatherman clashes with police in Chicago's Grant Park last October. But their class privileges paid off: the women were released in $40,000 bail. They are supposed to go on trial this week.

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