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"106 Suits Filed Under Mob Law in Harlem Riot," New York World-Telegram, July 23, 1935 [clipping].
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In civil court (September 1935-March 1936)
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On April 23, as the criminal courts resolved the final cases arising from the disorder, Attorney Barney Rosenstein filed claims on behalf of twenty white business owners seeking damages from the city government for losses they suffered as a result of the disorder. The legal basis for those claims was section 71 of the General Municipal Law, dating from 1855, which read, “A city or county shall be liable to a person whose property is destroyed or injured therein by a mob or riot for the damages sustained thereby” provided that person did not contribute to the damage, had used all reasonable diligence to prevent damage, notified the authorities of the threat to their property, and brought the action within three months. Many other states had similar laws, at least four of which extended to deaths and injuries as well as property damage, with the result that claims for damages were common in the aftermath of racial disorders. However, historians typically have made only passing mention of damage claims — or no mention at all in the case of those resulting from the disorder in Harlem. That neglect is particularly striking given the emphasis on violence targeting property as the defining feature of the events in 1935 and the racial disorders in subsequent decades. The scale of the property losses reported in the claims, the failures of police that contributed to the damage and made the city liable for it brought into focus how the disorder had challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem.
Those municipal liability laws originated in the nineteenth century in response to losses suffered by wealthy property owners. Linked to principles of community responsibility for preventing disorder and paying its costs in England's Riot Act of 1714, the laws were promoted as holding local authorities responsible for maintaining order and making compensation for losses more accessible, as Perry Blatz has shown in the case of Pennsylvania and Adam Malka in the case of Maryland. The Illinois law, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1911, was put to use in the aftermath of the three major racial disorders that occurred in the state in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1908, after the Springfield riot, Black and white residents filed property claims that amounted to at least $120,000, historian Roberta Senechal de la Roche briefly noted, approximately two-thirds from Black residents. A story that appeared in several newspapers on September 16, 1909, after the deadline for the submission of claims, reported additional suits by relatives of six of those killed seeking an additional $35,000. To pay those damages, the city had to issue special bonds, which funded $45,000 in "judgements, costs and interest" in August 1913, and to pay for the bonds for many years after that. Nine years later, the riot in East St Louis resulted in a flood of claims from Black residents that ultimately forced that city government to also resort to a bond issue, as Malcolm McLaughlin briefly noted in his study. In 1921, five years after the riot, the city issued $454,000 of bonds, which resulted in taxpayers paying the costs of the violence until 1941. The Chicago riot in 1919 produced claims for loss of life as well as property. The claims related to death are mentioned in studies by David Krugler and Elizabeth Dale: Krugler attributes the decision of the city in 1922 to pay $4,500 to the family of each person killed in the disorder to the work of Black attorney Augustus Wilson, while Dale identifies several different Black lawyers, including those working with the NAACP's Joint Emergency Committee, who also represented Black defendants in the criminal courts. When the city agreed to that settlement in eighteen cases in December 1922, it had already paid out $20,800 in five cases resolved in court with fifteen more cases unresolved, the Chicago Tribune reported, and thirty-three additional suits for injuries expected to result in payments of $1,000 each. Unmentioned by Krugler are the claims for property damage, which came from both white and Black residents. The amount of those claims was not available to the Chicago Tribune reporter in 1922, but earlier stories had reported that only around $100,000 of the more than $1 million of claims filed were for death or injury, with more than 600 suits for property damage making up the rest of that total. As would be the case in 1935, a handful of law firms filed large numbers of claims; ninety-five from one firm, according to one story, more than eighty claims from another firm mentioned in another story.
Despite the awareness of the Chicago riot evident in the aftermath of the disorder in 1935, there was no anticipation in the press of such claims being filed in New York City. When claims were filed, the New York Times reported them as the first suits brought under the law in the city. The New York law had provided the basis for the payment of damages after an earlier disorder marked by violence against Black residents, the Draft Riot in 1863, apparently without litigation. Nearly two thousand men and women filed claims; 416 claims were rejected by a special committee of the New York County Board of Supervisors, who then made their own assessment of the value claimants put on stolen or destroyed items. Although, as historian Joanna Cohen has shown, they reduced the value of the claims by $214,000, the city still paid out $1,122,805. Coincidentally, Mayor La Guardia claimed that a similar sum, $1 million, was at stake in claims against the city in 1935 — although the total of the claims filed had earlier been reported as only $116,000. That figure, and the details of the handful of cases mentioned in the press, revealed more of the scale of the violence of the disorder than the proceedings in the criminal courts, with each claim aggregating the damage done by multiple attacks and thefts.
By July 1935, 106 claims had been filed, with sixty-five more rejected because they came after the three-month window allowed by the statute. While those suits came from just over a third of the 450 businesses estimated as having been damaged by the riot, there was no evidence of any filed by Black business owners. At the time of the disorder the city faced record numbers of claims for damages: the New York Times reported that the Division of Torts disposed of 2,084 cases in 1934, a 93% increase over the preceding year. In 1935, as in 1863, the city government's initial response to damage claims was to have the corporation counsel assess whether they could be resolved without resort to the courts. Few claims were settled in that way, according to the New York Times story, and the scale of those from the disorder in Harlem apparently led the city to contest them in court. Insurance companies also appeared as parties in this litigation. They had no liability if the events of March 19 and March 20 were a riot, as their policies excluded that situation. However, if the city's lawyers established that a riot had not occurred and the Municipal law thus did not apply, some liability would shift to the insurance companies.
As the city lost repeatedly in court, its lawyers and Mayor La Guardia insisted those decisions would be appealed and each case would be tried on its merits. However, no appeals appeared in the legal record nor were any trials reported in the press after the third case the city lost. The damages awarded in that final trial were significantly less than the sums claimed, as appears to have been typical for other lawsuits against the city: $24,450,640 of claims in 1934 had resulted in only $544,275 of payments, the New York Times reported. Given the failure of the defenses offered by the corporation counsel, the awards in the Supreme Court may have provided a basis for the city to settle the remaining claims for amounts that it considered reasonable. Fifty claims for $102,448 had been settled for $25,000 by late October 1937, according to a brief story in the Chicago Defender. At that time, the cost of settling all the claims filed was estimated at $100,000. The claims filed after a subsequent outbreak of racial disorder in Harlem in 1943 offered further evidence that damages were paid in 1935. However, on that later occasion, the city would avoid paying similar claims as a provision of the New York State War Emergency Act passed in 1942 made section 71 inoperative. While that legislation was ostensibly concerned with the consequences of war, city officials recognized the benefits in regards to racial violence. In prompting such measures, the civil suits brought into focus how the disorder challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem. The MCCH investigation, by contrast, would report few details of the nature and scale of the violence against people and property even as it directed attention to the broader issue of police violence targeted at Black residents of Harlem.
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Cases in the civil courts (106)
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At least one hundred and six claims seeking damages from the city were filed, with sixty-five more suits rejected because they were filed after the three-month window allowed by the statute. Those numbers were consistently reported by multiple newspapers in stories in July, 1935, but appear to have come from Barney Rosenstein, an attorney representing many of those plaintiffs, rather than an official source. The General Municipal Law required claims be filed within three months of the damage, so no additional cases could have been filed after that date. Nonetheless, a higher total, 160 cases, was reported in October, as only a proportion of the total, only those in the Municipal Court, which handled smaller claims. Only a handful of newspapers published that number. The New York Herald Tribune attributed that information to the corporation counsel, an official source, but no other story provided a source. The only indication of how many cases were in the other civil court, the Supreme Court, came in stories about the first trial in that court in March 1936. However, the number came not from an official source but again from Rosenstein, who mentioned fifteen "similar" cases. That number likely only represented cases that involved plaintiffs he represented. As the total of 106 cases was the most widely and consistently reported, it was used as a baseline in this study.
Only twenty-seven businesses are identified in reports of the litigation. None of those businesses had Black owners, and there was no evidence that Black business-owners filed damage claims. All but two of those business were represented by Barney Rosenstein. While several newspapers reported that he represented around half of the 106 cases reported in July, 1935, it is not clear how representative these plaintiffs are of those who filed claims. All but four of the businesses were located on Lenox Avenue, or just off the avenue, in the blocks from 125th Street to 130th Street. Several of those businesses were neighbors: Jacob Saloway, Anthony Avitable, and Manny Zipp at 381 and 383 Lenox Avenue; Jack Stern, Sam Apuzzo, and Michael D'Agostino at 348 Lenox Avenue; Irving Guberman and Samuel Mestetzky at 60 West 129th Street; and Michael D'Agostino and Irving Stekin at 361 and 363 Lenox Avenue. In addition, at least as recently as 1930, four of the business owners, Michael D'Agostino, William Gindin, Jacob Saloway, and Irving Stekin, had lived in 1930 in the apartments above 363 Lenox Avenue, a building anomalous in this area of Harlem in being home to only white residents. Barney Rosenstein represented all those men. Both the business owners not represented by Rosenstein had stores further north on Lenox Avenue, above West 131st Street. There is no evidence of whether their attorneys represented other business owners who filed claims; the New York Herald Tribune claimed that there were other lawyers like Rosenstein with multiple clients, a situation also seen in the aftermath of the racial disorder in Chicago in 1919.
Six insurance companies joined in suits against the city. Royal Insurance was identified as a co-defendant in the trial of William Feinstein's claim in the Municipal Court. It took a position at odds with the city in arguing that a riot had occurred, and thus the company had no liability as their policies excluded that situation. Approximately two-thirds of Harlem’s businesses had insurance according to a widely reported survey of forty-seven companies who paid out $147,315 to replace 697 glass windows broken in 300 stores. But insurance was not available throughout Harlem. One plaintiff, Estelle Cohen, complained to Mayor LaGuardia that she had no way of making up her loss of at least $800 as “we do not carry burglary insurance on account of not being able to get it up in that section,” just south of 132nd Street.
The total of the damage claims filed against the city was reported as $116,000 in July, 1935. Stories in the Daily News, New York World-Telegram, and the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier added that the claims ranged from $2.65 to more than $14,000. The first twenty claims announced in April by Barney Rubenstein made up just under $38,000 of the total, and ranged from $14,125 to $47.40, with a median claim of $733. Stories about the first trial to settle a claim reported a total of $1 million in claims, which some newspapers attributed to the judge and which a small number quoted Mayor La Guardia as saying. No sources noted or explained the jump in the total from what was reported in July. (The New York Herald Tribune had included an estimate of a "Million" in the headline of an early story on the disorder, but other newspaper stories in the immediate aftermath of the disorder had offered lower estimates: for example, around $500,000 according to the Afro-American, "more than $400,000" according to the Associated Press, and "more than $350,000" according to the Pittsburgh Courier. Most newspapers simply reported extensive property damage.) The claims that went to trial in the Municipal Court were for $627.40 and $980.13, and in the Supreme Court, $20,000. The type of business was identified for only sixteen of the twenty-seven claims. Nine of those business involved food and drink, five business involved clothing, and two businesses involved other goods The missing information, together with the small number of identified business, mean little weight can be given to that distribution, but it was in line with the targets of looting during the disorder. In other words, there is no evidence that the owners of particular types of businesses filed claims more often than others.
At least initially, the city's lawyer, the corporation counsel, pursued a strategy of denying all the claims. As a result, the claims had to be resolved in the city's civil courts, the Municipal Court, the venue for smaller claims, and the Supreme Court, the venue for larger claims. Only three trials were reported in the press, two in the Municipal Court in September and October 1935, and one in the Supreme Court in March 1936. The interval between the deadline for filing claims in June and the legal proceedings was likely the result of the full calendar of the courts noted by the New York World-Telegram. Newspaper stories referred to all three trials as test cases, although the New York Times reported that the city's lawyers denied that and insisted they would try all the claims individually on their merits. The cases of William Feinstein's liquor store and Anna Rosenberg's notion store tried in the Municipal Court appear typical of the claims filed after the disorder, other than the fire set in Rosenberg's store. Only two other stores were damaged by fire during the disorder. They were the only two plaintiffs identified in the press not represented by Barney Rosenstein. Charles Garfinkel represented William Feinstein. Anna Rosenberg's attorney was not identified.
The city's liability for damages resulting from a riot, while seemingly not well known, at least among reporters, was clearly established by state law and by judicial decisions that interpreted that law broadly. The legal basis for the claims was a statute enacted in 1855. Section 71 of the General Municipal Law read, “A city or county shall be liable to a person whose property is destroyed or injured therein by a mob or riot for the damages sustained thereby” provided that person did not contribute to the damage, had used all reasonable diligence to prevent damage, notified the authorities of the threat to their property, and brought the action within three months. The manager of Feinstein's store and the owner of a business near Rosenberg's closed store described crowds on the street breaking windows, looting stores, and setting fire despite the presence of police. Rosenstein's clients, based on their testimony to the comptroller before their trials, more explicitly criticized police for providing insufficient protection for their stores, and refusing direct appeals for help. Such failures were not necessary to obtaining damages; they did, however, establish that the business owners and their staff had not contributed to the damage and that the authorities were aware of the riot. This evidence effectively left the city with only one defense, that the events in Harlem had not been a riot. That was the main claim of a motion that the corporation counsel filed after the jury ruled in favor of William Feinstein and awarded him damages. The judge in that trial, Benjamin Shalleck, reserved judgement on that motion so he could research the law; the judge in Rosenberg's trial simply dismissed the city's motion after that jury also ruled in the plaintiff's favor. Shalleck confirmed that position when he published his opinion two weeks later. In the Supreme Court a month later, the corporation counsel advanced a specific definition of a riot that he contended events in Harlem did not fit, and called three senior police officers to give testimony in support of that position. Again, the jury was not persuaded and awarded damages to the seven plaintiffs whose cases Rosenstein presented.
While the city lost all three cases, the damages the jury awarded in the two Municipal Court cases were significantly larger than those later awarded by their counterparts in the Supreme Court. Feinstein's award was $450, 70% of his claim of $627.40. Rosenberg's award was $804, 82% of her insurance company's appraisal of her losses, $980.13. The seven plaintiffs in the Supreme Court collectively received $1,200, only 6% of their $20,000 of claims. That dramatic drop in the awards was not remarked upon or explained in the press, but it could explain the lack of subsequent trials. Awards of that scale could have encouraged the city to settle the other cases.
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Looting without arrest (38)
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No one was identified as being arrested for looting just over half of the businesses identified in the sources. There are eighteen individuals arrested for looting for whom there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those men may have been charged with taking goods from stores for which there was no reported arrests. There are also twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions. They may have been initially arrested for looting and then had the charges against them reduced when police could not produce evidence that they had taken property rather than been part of crowds around looted businesses. However, only 6% (3 of 50) of those accused of looting were ultimately charged with disorderly conduct (the charges brought against ten of those arrested for looting are unknown).
That evidence supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the Mayor 's Commission (MCCH) report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9:00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. Irving Stekin told the city comptroller that the two police officers who eventually responded to his call to protect his store "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the MCCH Report. A more pointed image of that futility, in which police dispersed crowds only to see them gather again on the opposite side of the street, was described in the Afro-American and by business owners who testified in the Municipal Court. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.
The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9:00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in that strategy. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” according to the Daily Mirror. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue. Armed patrolmen guarded Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of that intersection as well as other businesses with broken windows in this area. The Daily News noted that guarding “windowless stores” handicapped police without referring to which stores received that protection. This scale of police presence is likely why only one business on West 125th Street — Young’s hat store — was among those reported looted despite at least twenty-three other stores having their windows broken. (The New York Evening Journal did report that "the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street,” but as no other sources reported such looting, that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.)
Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets. The New York Times reported that an emergency truck was stationed at West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, in the heart of the blocks that saw the most reported looting. Police made eighteen arrests on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th, but clearly lacked the numbers to guard damaged stores or prevent crowds from forming as they did around West 125th Street. Similarly, police arrested three men for looting Jack Garmise's cigar store on 7th Avenue near West 116th Street, indicating the presence of uniformed officers and detectives, but their activity apparently did not extend to the blocks of West 116th Street to the east or the adjacent blocks of Lenox Avenue where Hispanic-owned businesses predominated. Two stores were reported looted in that area, and at least another eleven had windows broken, a reporter from La Prensa found, without an arrest being made during the disorder. The police were not alone in their inattention to that area. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street.)
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Claims for damages examined by the Comptroller, July 23 (8)
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At the end of July, the Daily News, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, New York Evening Journal, and the Black newspapers the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier published stories about claims for damages filed after the disorder. Barney Rosenstein, the white attorney representing about half of the business owners who filed claims, prompted those stories by releasing the testimony that at least seven of his clients gave when they were examined by the comptroller, the first step in the legal process, according to the New York Post. The New York Evening Journal reported simply that the testimony was "made public," and did not mention Rosenstein. (The lawyer represented unions and later worked for the legal arm of the Communist Party, the International Labor Defense, frequent targets of the Hearst press, which may have led the newspaper's editors to omit him. The Daily News and Pittsburgh Courier stories were the only other accounts that omitted mention of Rosenstein.) The other stories did not identify the source of their information.
All the stories reported that 106 claims had been filed for damages totaling $116,000. The Daily News, New York World-Telegram, and the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier added the detail that the sums claimed ranged from $2.65 to $14,000. An additional sixty-five claims had been rejected as they had been filed more than the thirty days after the disorder, the period allowed in section 71 of the General Municipal Law, according to the New York World-Telegram and the New York Amsterdam News. Only the Daily News, New York World-Telegram, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier identified six insurance companies as among the plaintiffs, seeking to recover what they had paid to the business owners with policies covering their broken windows — reported earlier as $147,315. The New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, and New York Amsterdam News stories described the city's response, filing a "general denial" of all the claims that meant they would be resolved in court. The claim published in the New York World-Telegram that the full calendar of the court would delay trials until the next year proved accurate only for the Supreme Court: two cases were tried in the Municipal Court, in September and November.
The claims filed by Rosenstein asserted that the police department provided "insufficient protection" to the stores and that the police on the scene were "inefficient in handling the mob," phrases quoted in both the New York Sun and the New York World-Telegram, and paraphrased in the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier. Rather than quoting from the claims, the New York Post story described them as charging "police laxity" and used them as the basis for taunting the city's police: "Where were those tough, hard-boiled cops when a riot broke out in Harlem, March 19? Why did they forget then that swaggering aggressiveness which pickets and soapboxers know so well?" By contrast, taking the other side in the ongoing tension between Mayor La Guardia and the police department, the New York Sun blamed the Mayor's "kid-glove methods" for the failed police response: "While scenes of terror rocked the Negro section during most of the late afternoon and night, Mayor La Guardia persisted in his attitude that things would come out alright, that the police had the situation in hand. His attitude, it was apparent, was responsible for the comparative gentleness with which the situation was handled by the cops." (The Daily News made no mention of the charges against the police, reporting only that the suits "claimed redress as taxpayers from the municipal corporations.")
With the exception of the Daily News, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier, the stories quoted testimony from seven business owners. Only Harry Piskin was mentioned in all those stories, in part because he claimed the largest sum for damages, but also because he recounted being refused help by police on three occasions. George Chronis, Manny Zipp, Anthony Avitable, and Irving Stekin each featured in three stories, Benjamin Zelvin in two stories, and Harry Levinson in only one story. The New York World-Telegram provided the most testimony, from six business owners (Avitable, Piskin, Chronis, Zipp, Zelvin, Stekin), with five quoted in the New York Sun (Piskin, Levinson, Stekin, Avitable, Zipp) and New York Post (Chronis, Stekin, Zipp, Avitable, Piskin), and two in the New York Amsterdam News (Piskin and Chronis) and New York Evening Journal (Piskin and Zelvin).
Piskin, Avitable, and Levinson had appeared on the list of twenty filing claims released in April, indicating that group was likely represented by Rosenstein. Chronis, Zipp, Stekin, and Zelvin were among those for whom Rosenstein later filed claims. In all, he represented "more than half" the 106 plaintiffs, according to the New York World-Telegram and Chicago Defender or "about half" according to the New York Post and New York Sun or "many plaintiffs" according to the New York Amsterdam News. A similar pattern of a single law firm filing multiple claims was apparent after the 1919 Chicago riot.
The claims for damages created records of events in the disorder missing from newspaper stories and police and criminal court records. Police made arrests only for looting of Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store; none of the other looted businesses identified in the press at this time appeared in any other sources.
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Businesses that did not survive (5)
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The white-owned newspapers the New York Sun and the New York Evening Journal, the Black-owned Afro-American and the Spanish-language publication La Prensa reported that businesses in Harlem might close as a result of the disorder. The New York Sun implied that racial conflict motivated such decisions: "It is reported that many white merchants of the Harlem district have signified their intention of leaving the neighborhood just as soon as they can arrange for the disposition of their stocks." La Prensa reported a similar sentiment, that "it is impossible to continue doing business in areas that are exposed to racial outbursts and radical controversies." The statement in the New York Evening Journal was speculation linked to the losses suffered: "The looting of stores reached such proportions that small merchants feared they would be thrown into bankruptcy." The Afro-American's correspondent offered a similar assessment: "[Many businesses] probably will never open again because their owners are bankrupt as a result of the looting of stores and lack of insurance to cover the losses."
A similar claim was made by Barney Rosentein, the attorney representing more than half of the 106 business owners who sued the city to recover losses they suffered during the disorder. "Many of his clients, Mr Rosenstein said, were completely wiped out by the wave of robberies which followed the beginning of the riots," the New York World-Telegram reported. The New York Sun reported the same claim without attributing it to Rosenstein. In newspaper stories about their suits against the city, only five business owners are identified as saying that they had gone out of business due to the damages they suffered. This group included the two owners who made the largest claims for damages, Harry Piskin ($14,125) and George Chronis ($14,000), and the owners who made the fourth and seventh largest claims, Harry Levinson ($4,805) and Irving Stekin ($2,068). The remaining owner, Manny Zipp, claimed only $721 in damages, below the median claim of $733.13 for the twenty-six owners identified in newspaper stories. Piskin and Chronis both told the city comptroller that extensive damage to their stores had put them out of business. Piskin said "they looted his laundry, broke all of his machinery and drove him out of business," the New York Sun reported, while Chronis said his lunchroom had been "completely demolished," according to the New York World-Telegram. Zipp and Levinson emphasized lost merchandise. Zipp told the city comptroller "everything in his store was taken," forcing him out of business, in a story in the New York Post, while Levinson said the "mob cleaned out" his store, forcing him to retire, the New York Sun reported. In Stekin's case, no explanation was given; a story in the New York Sun simply said he was not in business anymore.
Indirect evidence of what happened to other businesses can be found in the MCCH business survey undertaken between June and December 1935 and the Tax Department building photographs taken between 1939 and 1941. However, the survey and photographs do not provide certain or comprehensive evidence. While the survey identified more than 10,000 businesses, other sources do indicate that it did miss some businesses and sometimes incorrectly recorded addresses. In most cases, the owner and the business name were also not recorded, so they cannot be matched to looted businesses with certainty. In addition, some of the Tax Department building photographs taken between 1939 and 1941 are taken from a distance or angle that does not show the storefront of the address that was looted.
Twenty-one additional business owners who sued the city are identified in newspaper stories, seven of whom continued to operate their businesses after the disorder, appearing in the MCCH business survey and/or the Tax Department building photographs. Those businesses reported damages ranging from $453.90 to $1,273.90, lesser amounts than all but one of the businesses that closed. Those sources do not offer information on the remaining fourteen businesses identified as the subject of damage suits. Four of those owners claimed damages higher than those that remained in business: Samuel Mestetzky claimed $5,860.50; Irving Guberman claimed $3,967; Benjamin Zelvin claimed $2,685; and Sam Lefkowitz claimed $1,610.64. The scale of those damages makes it possible that these men may also have gone out of business.
The losses for twenty-six additional businesses reported in legal records and the press were, with one exception, less than those of the businesses reported as suing the city, ranging from $10-12 to $1,000 (and one with losses of $10,000), with a median loss of only $100. Nineteen of those businesses reopened after the disorder; there is no information on the other seven businesses.
In addition to the twenty-six business owners identified as suing the city, an additional eighty others also filed suits. Some of those businesses may be among those who appeared in legal records. There is no information on the scale of the damage they suffered, so no indication of whether any likely did not reopen.
In total, nearly ninety percent (40 of 45) of the businesses reported as having being looted that can be identified in the sources reopened after the disorder.
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In civil court on March 4, 1936
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Four months elapsed after Judge Shalleck upheld a jury's decision to award damages of $450 to William Feinstein before any further claims resulting from the disorder went to trial. Those legal proceedings differed significantly from the two previous trials. The venue was the Supreme Court, not the Municipal Court, a change that resulted from the larger sum of damages claimed, a total of $20,000. Rather than a single plaintiff, the trial had seven: Anthony Avitable, George Chronis, Michael D'Agostino, Jacob Saloway, Harry Schwartz, Irving Stekin, and the unnamed owner of the Romanoff Drug Store. The damages were not distributed evenly among those seven plaintiffs; Chronis' claim was for $14,000 after crowds "completely demolished" his restaurant. All those business owners had been identified in the press in April and July as filing claims, and all were represented by attorney Barney Rosenstein. A different attorney opposed Rosenstein, with Assistant Corporation Counsel Matthew Troy taking the place of Aaron Arnold.
The differences between this trial and the earlier proceedings extended to how the corporation counsel approached defending the city. His argument still centered on the question of whether a riot had taken place, but now advanced a definition of a riot as involving concerted action that was not present in the disorder in Harlem. The exact terms Troy employed are uncertain in the absence of a legal record of the trial, as the three newspaper stories that mentioned the city's argument each reported different language: a "concerted uprising” according to the New York Post; "concentrated uprising" in the New York Amsterdam News; and "concerted movement of the mob" in the California Eagle. That was all the details that the stories gave of the definition, so the authorities on which it relied are unknown.
On what basis Troy argued that concerted action was not present in the Harlem disorder is also unknown. However, in another apparent departure from the earlier trials, he called witnesses in support of the city's defense. Three senior police officers testified: First Deputy Police Commissioner Harold Fowler, and two officers who had been present in Harlem during the disorder, Chief Inspector John Seery and Inspector John Di Martini. They could have described the disorder as involving a variety of individuals and groups behaving in different ways at different times in different places rather than a single group acting together. Drawing on that testimony, Troy might have argued that the crowd Anthony Avitable saw breaking into his store, those who attacked George Chronis' restaurant, and those who threw stones through the windows of Irving Stekin's grocery store were unrelated, each acting independently rather than in concert, pursuing their own goals, not participating in a riot.
Whatever the substance and logic of Troy's defense of the city, it proved no more persuasive than that offered by Arnold. The jury awarded the business owners damages totaling $1,200. On first glance, that was a larger sum than the verdicts in the previous trials, and most newspapers simply reported the number. But seen in relation to claims that had totaled $20,000, the damages were on a significantly smaller scale. Feinstein and Rosenberg had received 70% and 82% of the sums they had claimed. Irving Stekin's award, the largest made by this jury, by contrast, amounted to only around 27% of his claims, while Michael D'Agostino's award, the smallest made by the jury, amounted to only 20% of his claims. (The individual awards to the other plaintiffs were not reported.) In those terms, the city's losses from the verdict were far less than in the previous trials.
In the immediate aftermath of the verdict, the corporation counsel responded, as he had after the previous two trials, with a plan to appeal it to a higher court. However, no appeal was filed. Nor were any further trials of claims for damages from the disorder reported in the press, notwithstanding that Barney Rosenstein had told reporters that fifteen similar cases were awaiting trial in the Supreme Court. If those cases, and the one hundred and sixty cases reported pending in the Municipal Court after Rosenberg's lawsuit, did not come to trial, the likeliest explanation is that the city reached settlements with the business owners. The relatively low awards in the Supreme Court verdict could have established a precedent for damages more manageable and acceptable for the city than the awards in the earlier trials. What a journalist from the Chicago Defender found when they "probe[d] into the city files" at the end of October, 1937 appeared to confirm that was what was happening. The story reported that fifty claims for $102,448 had been settled for $25,000 by that date. Twenty-four additional suits in which damages were awarded were still being paid. At that time, the cost of settling all the claims filed was estimated at $100,000.
Further evidence that the city had paid damages came after racial disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943. Eight hundred claims were filed against the city for $4 million of damages, the New York Times reported, with Barney Rosenstein again among the attorneys representing the neighborhood's business owners. That scale of action would have been unlikely had the claims filed only eight years earlier not produced payments from the city. However, the law had changed since 1935. The War Emergency Act of 1942 had suspended section 70 of the General Municipal Law. While some uncertainty existed about whether the suspension applied to events not directly related to the war, the confidence of city officials that it did proved well placed. Barney Rosenstein was one of those who appealed a claim to test the city's liability; the Appeals Court ruled in 1945 that the Act prevented the award of damages, as the New York Supreme Court had a year earlier. The suspension of section 70 was not lifted at the end of the war, but instead incorporated into the New York State Defense Emergency Act of 1951 which provided for civil defense administration and renewed into the 1970s. Consequently, the city was also protected from liability for damage resulting from the racial disorder in Harlem in 1964 even as section 70 remained on the books. These continued efforts to protect the city from a repeat of the litigation in 1935 brought into focus how the disorder had challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem. While civil litigation made evident the scale of the violence to an extent that the criminal prosecutions had not, the investigations and reports of the MCCH took only limited note of those accounts. Instead, they gave attention another form of violence absent from the criminal prosecutions: police violence against Harlem residents.
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2023-05-27T01:21:26+00:00
Before civil court, July 23
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2023-12-15T02:29:23+00:00
On July 23, Barney Rosenstein, one of the attorneys representing business owners, made public the testimony several of his clients had given when questioned by the comptroller. By that time, the three-month deadline set in the statute for filing claims for damages resulting from a riot had passed. Just how many claims had been filed is uncertain. A total of one hundred and six claims was reported by the press at this time, with an additional sixty-five claims rejected as submitted too late. Later newspaper stories would refer to a total of 160 claims for small sums and at least twenty-two claims for larger sums. No official source provided a total number of claims. If the higher numbers were accurate, claims were filed for at least one-third of the estimated 450 businesses damaged during the disorder.
Not only business owners had filed claims against the city. So too did at least six of the insurance companies with whom Harlem's businesses had policies. By this time, claims on those policies had resulted in payments $147,315 to replace 697 glass windows broken in 300 stores, according to a widely reported survey. Business owners had lost merchandise as well as windows, so insurance companies also faced additional, larger claims. However, those policyholders faced almost certain disappointment. Their policies excluded losses suffered as a result of riots. In fact, it was such exclusions that had contributed to the enactment of statutes like Section 71 of New York's General Municipal Law to provide property owners with compensation in those circumstances. The insurance companies who filed claims sought to have the city reimburse them for payments they had made for windows. They would also have been aware that they needed to act to ensure that city's response to the claims did not shift liability back to them.
City officials had decided on their response to the claims by this time: a "general denial," as stories in the New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, and New York Amsterdam News put it. As a result, the claims would be decided by juries in the city's civil courts, the Municipal Court, in the case of smaller claims, and the Supreme Court, in the case of larger claims. A blanket denial clearly relied on the law and involved the city's lawyers, not individual assessments of the sums claimed made by the comptroller. That did not mean that the value of the claims had no bearing on the city's position. The total reported at this time would not have been overly burdensome for the city: $116,000, with individual claims that ranged from $2.65 to $14,000. The later reports of a larger number of claims, however, referred to a dramatically higher total: $1 million. Liability on that scale could not be managed by disputing claims and negotiating reduced settlements: it needed to be avoided. One defense the city could employ to avoid liability was of particular concern to the companies who had insured Harlem's businesses: that the events of March 19 and 20 had not been a riot. If the city's lawyers were to succeed in persuading a jury to take that view, they would not have simply avoided liability but shifted it to insurance companies whose policies would no longer exclude the damage.
However, the question of whether a riot had occurred was not one that came up when the comptroller questioned the business owners represented by Rosenstein. What attracted the attention of the journalists were the business owners' testimony that police had either not made an effort to protect their premises or had been unable to handle the crowds when they did. Henry Piskin tried three times to get police to protect his laundry from being bombarded by rocks and looted. A police officer a block away at the intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue told him, "Report it--I can't leave my post," according to the New York Post. When he did report it at the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, the response was, "Oh we know all about it." When Piskin complained about not receiving help, a police officer answered, "My life is more important to me than your business is to you." When Anthony Avitable rushed to Harlem on learning of the disorder, and saw crowds breaking into his store and no police nearby, he drove on to the 28th Precinct station to report the looting, the New York Post reported. Officers there said they "couldn't do anything for me," and told him to phone police headquarters. The officer who answered assured Avitable that, "I'll have men there in two minutes." They did not arrive for forty-five minutes. Irving Stekin waited two hours for police to respond after he reported that a stone had been thrown through his store window. The two patrolmen who did arrive "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. Benjamin Zelvin waited half an hour after calling the 28th Precinct for police to arrive to protect his jewelry store. However, that protection proved fleeting. Some time after Zelvin left for home, the officers also left, so police "didn't know anything about" the subsequent looting, the New York World-Telegram reported. Calls to police by staff in George Chronis' restaurant brought no response, leading the two Black staff to leave and the white staff member to lock himself in a washroom while the restaurant was attacked.
That testimony prompted very different reactions in the New York Post and in the New York Sun. The New York Post story used it to taunt the police: "Where were those tough, hard-boiled cops when a riot broke out in Harlem, March 19? Why did they forget then that swaggering aggressiveness which pickets and soapboxers know so well?" By contrast, the New York Sun took the other side in the ongoing tension between Mayor La Guardia and the police department, blaming the Mayor's "kid-glove methods" for the failed police response: "While scenes of terror rocked the Negro section during most of the late afternoon and night, Mayor La Guardia persisted in his attitude that things would come out alright, that the police had the situation in hand. His attitude, it was apparent, was responsible for the comparative gentleness with which the situation was handled by the cops." The Uptown Chamber of Commerce, an organization made up of white owners of larger businesses, had in the immediate aftermath of the disorder leveled a similar charge that police were "pampering" radicals, calling on the mayor to tell the police "that they will be backed to the limit as long as they exercise restraint and display good judgment" in order to dispel the impression that "the police are under wraps when dealing with rioters." At the same time they were condescendingly dismissed the complaints of the "small merchants of Harlem" that the police lacked the ability to control the riot. The Harlem Merchants Association had claimed police were "inadequately equipped to handle the situation" in a telegram sent the day after the disorder appealing to the Governor of New York to send troops.
It would be some time before the business owners would find out how jurors rather than journalists reacted to their testimony. Civil proceedings to resolve their claims threatened to take even more time than the criminal process, in which only two cases resulting from the disorder remained outstanding by this time. The full calendars of the civil courts would likely delay trials until the next year, according to the New York World-Telegram. -
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2021-04-13T17:34:18+00:00
Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store looted
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2023-12-02T03:37:35+00:00
Benjamin Zelvin locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11:30 PM on March 19. The forty-eight-year-old Russian born resident of Brooklyn may also have boarded up the windows, as a Home News story mentioned boards later being pulled away when the store was attacked. Although there were no reports of looting in this area at that time, there apparently were crowds or other activity that led Zelvin to seek police protection for his store before leaving it. Across the street at 371 Lenox Avenue, Irving Stekin had also called police, after a window in his grocery store was broken, likely around this time. The New York World-Telegram reported that Zelvin told a representative of the city comptroller's office that he waited more than half an hour after calling the station house before police reached his store (Stekin reported waiting two hours). Those officers apparently did not remain at Zelvin's store, as it was later looted, probably starting around midnight; police told Zelvin "they didn't know anything about it." However, Officer Astel of the 25th Precinct arrested two men, John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, and Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer around 2:15 AM at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. He allegedly found a quantity of jewelry in the men's possession, which they admitted to taking from Zelvin's store. A Home News story reported that they had "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where he found all the windows broken. Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock, the value of the jewelry was initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. Zelvin later assessed his total losses as far greater. When he joined other merchants in filing claims for damages suffered in the disorder, the New York World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2,685. The New York Evening Journal reported Zelvin told the comptroller that his losses were "because of the lack of police protection."
There were no newspaper stories about the looting. Henry and Leacock appeared only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested published in Black newspapers and in the New York Evening Journal. The District Attorney's case file contained some details; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information was from the Magistrate Court affidavit. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men.
Zelvin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge an additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary (the only other individual charged for an offense related to the disorder in the court that day was John Henry, although Zelvin was not listed as the complainant in that case). Goodwin appeared only in the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; there were no details of his alleged crime. If he did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they were worth less than $100. When Goodwin appeared again, the charge was reduced to petit larceny and the Magistrate transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. Like Henry and Leacock, the police blotter recorded that the judges convicted him.
Zelvin had started his own business soon after arriving in the city in 1904. By 1918 at the latest, when he registered for the draft, his business was located at 372 Lenox Avenue. By that time Zelvin was also living in Harlem, at 327 Lenox Avenue, where he still resided at the time of the 1920 federal census. Sometime before the state census in 1925, he relocated to a house he bought on 83rd Street in Brooklyn, which is where he lived at the time of the disorder according to the 1940 census. It was possible that Zelvin did not reopen his jewelry store in Harlem after the disorder. It did not appear in the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935, which recorded no business at 372 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 was from an angle that did not offer a clear view of the business at that address. By the time the fifty-six year old Zelvin registered for the draft in 1942, he listed his place of business as 4116 8th Avenue in Brooklyn. -
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2021-05-06T20:15:44+00:00
Anthony Avitable's grocery store looted
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2023-11-13T02:58:04+00:00
Anthony Avitable's grocery store at 381 Lenox Avenue was closed when crowds appeared on Lenox Avenue. That section of Lenox Avenue was one in which businesses suffered extensive damage with looting beginning around 11:30 PM. Around midnight, Avitable got news of the disorder in Harlem and drove back from the Bronx. He told the city comptroller that as he drove over the 138th Street bridge he saw crowds "just breaking into my store," the New York Sun reported. Seeing no police near the store, he drove on to the 28th Precinct Station on West 123rd Street and at 12:30 AM reported the looting, according to the New York Post. Officers there said they "couldn't do anything for me," and that he should contact police headquarters. When Avitable called, "a police officer at headquarters told him over the phone: 'I'll have men there in two minutes.'" They took forty-five minutes to arrive. Avitable's store likely suffered more damage in the violence around 1:00 AM, when Alice Mitchell and Hugh Young were injured by flying glass. No one arrested during the disorder was charged with looting this store.
Avitable joined one hundred and five other white business owners in suing the city for damages suffered by their stores during the disorder. The only mentions of his business are in newspaper stories about those suits. Those stories located his store at 383 Lenox Avenue. A second storeowner who sued the city, Manny Zipp, was also reported as having a grocery store at 383 Lenox Avenue by the New York Sun, New York Post, and New York World-Telegram. Photographs of 383 Lenox Avenue show only one business at that address, the Savoy Food Market, but there was a grocery store next door, with a Krasdale sign, at 381 Lenox Avenue, that appears to be the store that Avitable owned (the Krasdale company were wholesalers in 1935, not store operators). While the New York Sun identified Anthony Avitable as the owner of the Savoy Food Market, the New York Post and New York World-Telegram identified him only as the owner of a separate grocery store. He appeared separately from the Savoy Food Market in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News stories about those who brought the first twenty suits. Zipp had only been in business for three days. Newsreel footage from the day after the disorder shows a banner reading "Grand Opening" hanging over the entrance to the Savoy Food Market (in the Daily News photograph discussed below that a piece of dark fabric has been hung to obscure that banner, or perhaps the banner has simply been reversed). Zipp also reported that his losses, $721 compared to the $537 claimed by Avitable, forced him out of business. It was the Savoy Food Market that went out of business; there was a different store at 383 Lenox Avenue in both the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941. The grocery store with the Krasdale sign, Avitable's business, did appear in both the MCCH business survey and the Tax Department photograph. He may have been helped by damages paid by the city. One of the claimants awarded damages in the March 4, 1936, trial in the New York Supreme Court listed in the New York Herald Tribune was a grocer at 381 Lenox Avenue. However, the story identified the owner as Louis Berenson. That could be an error as no one of that name appears in any other source related to the disorder.
An unpublished image taken by a photographer for the Hearst newspapers, and a similar image published in the Daily News, captured the clean-up on the section of Lenox Avenue containing Avitable's store the morning after the disorder. The windows are missing, and both the display and the shelves within the store are empty. Some goods appear to have been thrown on to the street; a man is clearing debris with a shovel. Zipp's Savoy Food Market, and Jacob Saloway's cigar store on the corner, also have no windows and empty displays and shelves. Saloway joined Avitable and Zipp in suing the city.
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2021-05-04T21:48:40+00:00
Irving Stekin's grocery store looted
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2023-12-01T03:31:33+00:00
When someone on Lenox Avenue threw "the first stone" at the windows of Irving Stekin's grocery store at 371 Lenox Avenue, he called police, according to the New York Sun report of his suit against the city. There was no mention in the newspaper stories of when that stone was thrown, but it was likely sometime soon after 11:00 PM, when Louis Levy left his dry goods store across the street at 374 Lenox Avenue seemingly unconcerned about crowds on the street, and perhaps around 11:30 PM, when Benjamin Zelvin closed his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue, next to Levy's business, and, like Stekin, called police to protect it from attack. Stekin waited two hours before a police car containing two officers arrived in response to his call, a detail reported in the New York Sun, New York Post, and New York World-Telegram. There was no mention of what Stekin did in the interim; but he could have done little to prevent people damaging and looting his store given the size of the crowds, so most likely retreated to the rear rooms to avoid injury. When they arrived, the police officers fared no better. Stekin told the city comptroller that "The police didn't do anything. They couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. He had joined other white merchants in suing the city for damages on the basis that police had not protected businesses, so he had an incentive to emphasize police failures. Nonetheless, the extent of the attacks on businesses and violence in this area, and the small number of arrests, most of which came several hours after crowds first arrived on the avenue, add weight to his complaint. Michael D'Agostino's business at 361 Lenox Avenue was looted, while the South Harlem Rotisserie at 365 Lenox Avenue and the laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue had windows broken. Across the street, Levy and Zelvin's businesses at 372 and 374 Lenox Avenue were also looted. No one among those arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from this store.
The Pathe newsreel included footage of 371 Lenox Avenue taken the day after the disorder that shows the sign identifying it as a "Cut Rate Grocery," as the New York Post reported, not a stationery store as the New York Sun and New York World-Telegram had labeled Stekin's business. Both windows and the door have been blocked off with large planks of wood, and appeared to have been completely smashed. It is not possible to see the extent of damage within the store. A white man smoking a cigarette stands in front of the door, perhaps the thirty-six-year old, Russian born Stekin, facing the crowd walking along the sidewalk. The only details of the damage to Stekin's store was in newspaper stories about the civil suits against the city brought by white merchants. Stekin was not part of the group of twenty men who brought the first suits, but was mentioned in stories published at the end of July, by which time 106 merchants had filed suits. He appeared as an example because of the large sum of damages he sought, $2,068, as a result of which, the New York Sun reported, Stekin "is not in business anymore." Or at least not at that location. He also sued for damages to a second unspecified business, at 363 Lenox Avenue, four buildings to the south of the grocery store, according to the New York Times, where he was still in business when he registered for the draft in 1942. In 1930, the federal census records that Stekin had lived above the store at 363 Lenox Avenue, a building anomalous in this area of Harlem in being home to only white residents. The six other households included three headed by men who owned stores in Harlem later looted during the disorder. All three men joined Stekin in suing the city, William Gindin, Jacob Saloway, and Michael D'Agostino. There was no evidence of whether Stekin still lived there in 1935; Gindin at least had relocated to another building on Lenox Avenue by the time of the disorder.
After the city lost the civil case that went to trial to test the merchants' case, Stekin's actions for damages were one of seven cases taken to the Supreme Court to determine the city's liability. The damages claimed in those cases totaled $20,000, according to a report in the New York Times; Justice Shientag awarded a total of only $1,200. Stekin received the largest award, although newspaper stories disagreed on the amount. The New York Times identified the award as $550 for damages to both the stationery store and the business at 363 Lenox Avenue that he had valued at more than $2,000, while the New York Amsterdam News identified the award as $700. While the New York Times reported that the city would appeal the decisions, there was no evidence that happened. Consistent with the New York Sun report that Stekin was no longer in business at 371 Lenox Avenue after the disorder, the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 recorded a Black-owned "Stationery Store & Religious Supplies" business at that address. That store too appeared to have gone out of business, as the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 shows a grocery store at 371 Lenox Avenue. -
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2021-11-21T20:18:50+00:00
Laundry window broken
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2023-11-30T18:38:25+00:00
A laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue had its window broken during the disorder. The Chinese owner had tried to protect his store by emulating Black business owners in putting a sign in his window identifying it as not a white-owned business. Where the signs that appeared on Black-owned stores read "Colored Store," “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” the Chinese laundryman's sign read "Me Colored Too." It failed to deter one or more people in the crowds on the street from smashing the window. None of those arrested for breaking windows during the disorder were charged with targeting this store.
Together with the damage done to Hispanic-owned businesses on and around West 116th Street, the windows broken in the laundry highlight both that Harlem's business sector was composed of more than just the Black and white owners mentioned in newspaper stories, and that the crowd's targets during the disorder were not limited to businesses owned by whites. While several Hispanic-owned businesses were among those reported damaged or looted during the disorder, this laundry is the only Chinese-owned business mentioned in the sources. However, the information on the Hispanic-owned businesses was found only in La Prensa; no Chinese-language publication that reported on the disorder has been found. Chinese-owned laundries and restaurants were an established and pervasive presence in Harlem. The MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 recorded 209 Chinese-owned businesses (3.5%, 209 of 5971), including 176 laundries and twenty-three restaurants dispersed throughout the area from 110th to 155th Street, from east of Amsterdam Avenue to the west of Madison Avenue.
None of the four Black-owned businesses recorded as being on this block in the MCCH business survey — a beauty parlor next door and a tailor four buildings north, and a candy store and grocery store across the avenue to the south at 360 Lenox Avenue — are reported to have put signs in their windows, so where the laundry owner got his inspiration from is uncertain. Several white-owned businesses around the laundry reported being looted. Irving Stekin, who owned a grocery store one buildings north of the laundry complained that the crowds in the area were too large for police on the scene to control, according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. His store, at 371 Lenox Avenue, and another he owned at 363 Lenox Avenue, and Michael D'Agostino's business at 361 Lenox Avenue were all looted, as were stores at 372 and 374 Lenox Avenue across the street. The South Harlem Rotisserie at 365 Lenox Avenue, like the laundry, only had windows broken. Attacks on businesses in this area likely began around 11:30 PM.
The laundry and its sign were reported by the Associated Press and in the New York Herald Tribune and Daily News as a vignette separate from the stories they published about the events of the disorder. In this form, it was presented as a joke at the expense of the Chinese laundryman. The New York Herald Tribune's story read:
An additional layer of racist language was added to the story in the Daily News, with the proprietor becoming "the oriental boss ironer," the "futile" trick becoming "wily," and the laundryman hanging out the sign becoming "the clever (or so he thought) laundryman." Louise Thompson also mentioned the sign in her memoir as a joke, "a humorous side" to the disorder in the first transcription and "an ironically humorous incident" in the edited version. Similarly, Langston Hughes mentioned the sign as a "touch of humor" in his biography of Lt. Battle; based on the interview notes, Battle himself did not mention the sign.The proprietor of a Chinese laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue resorted to a futile trick yesterday to protect his shop from Harlem rioters. His Negro neighbors hung signs bearing the word "Colored" in their store windows on reports that the rioters would not molest places occupied by Negroes. The laundryman hung out a large placard inscribed "Me colored too." Someone promptly smashed his window.
Two other sources mention the laundry and its sign without treating it as a joke, seemingly having missed the context of the information as they also departed from the account in other details and omitted the address of the business. “A Chinese laundryman pasted a placard inscribed 'Me colored, too,' and two Negroes immediately shattered his window,” the New York World-Telegram reported in a story that shifted the events to the night after the disorder. A story in the Black-owned Indianapolis Recorder folded the laundry into its discussion of signs being put up to identify Black-owned businesses, and reported that the sign in the laundry has the same result as those in Black-owned businesses: "His place was not touched." As this is the only source presenting that version of the events, the laundry is treated here as having broken windows.
The laundry appears in the MCCH business survey taken from June to December 1935, and is visible later, between 1939 and 1941, when the Tax Department photograph of the building was taken.
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2021-05-06T22:52:23+00:00
Manny Zipp's grocery store looted
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2023-12-13T03:54:48+00:00
Manny Zipp's grocery store at 383 Lenox Avenue was looted during the disorder. There are no details of those events other than Zipp's statement to the city comptroller that "everything in his store was taken," forcing him out of business, as the New York Post reported it. He had been operating the store for only three days. That section of Lenox Avenue was one in which businesses suffered extensive damage and looting beginning around 11:30 PM; the intersection likely saw particularly extensive violence around 1:00 AM when Alice Mitchell and Hugh Young were injured by flying glass. No one among those arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from this store.
Zipp was one of seven business owners mentioned in stories published in the New York Post, New York Sun, and New York World-Telegram on July 23 that described testimony to the comptroller from white businessmen suing the city for damages based on the failure of police to protect their stores. He was not in the list of those who brought the first twenty suits published earlier in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News, but included in that list was the Savoy Food Market. Newsreel footage from the day after the disorder showed a banner reading "Grand Opening" hanging over the entrance to the Savoy Food Market, fitting with Zipp's account of having opened his store only three days earlier (in the photograph discussed below, a piece of dark fabric had been hung to obscure that banner or perhaps the banner had simply been reversed). While the New York Sun identified Anthony Avitable as the owner of the Savoy Food Market, the New York Post and New York World-Telegram identified him only as the owner of a grocery store at 383 Lenox Avenue. Photographs of 383 Lenox Avenue show only one business at that address, but there was a grocery store next door, with a Krasdale sign, at 381 Lenox Avenue. That appeared to be the store that Avitable owned; the Krasdale company were wholesalers in 1935, not store operators. Avitable appeared separately from the Savoy Food Market in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News stories about those who brought the first twenty suits. Avitable also ultimately claimed a lesser amount of damage than Zipp, $537 compared to $721, which did not seem enough to have been enough to wipe out a business. It was the Savoy Food Market that went out of business, fitting with Zipp's story. There was a different business than the Savoy Food Market at 383 Lenox Avenue in both the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941. The grocery store with the Krasdale sign did appear in both the MCCH business survey and the Tax Department photograph.
Zipp's claim of $721 was close to the median reported claim for damages of $733. An unpublished image taken by a photographer for the Hearst newspapers, and a similar image published in the Daily News, captured the clean-up on the section of Lenox Avenue containing the Savoy Food Market. To its left was the grocery store that must be Avitable's business, with the Krasdale grocery chain sign visible. The market's windows had been smashed and the display emptied. Some goods appear to have been thrown on to the street; a man was clearing debris with a shovel. Another man can be seen through the window inside the store; that may be Avitable cleaning up. The two other businesses visible beyond the market also had no windows and empty displays and shelves. Jacob Saloway, who owned the cigar store on the corner, as well as Avitable, also sued the city for damages.
The three newspaper stories all reported the storeowner's name differently: the New York Sun called him "Manny Zipp," the New York Post reported his name as "Manning Zipp," and the World-Telegram "Manny Vitt." The name used here, Manny Zipp, combines the most frequently repeated elements of those variations. -
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2021-05-04T22:34:38+00:00
Irving Stekin's store looted
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2023-12-01T03:26:15+00:00
Irving Stekin's store at 363 Lenox Avenue was looted during the disorder. The thirty-six-year-old, Russian born Stekin also owned a grocery store in the same block, at 371 Lenox Avenue; it too was looted. He was in that second store when a stone was thrown through its window, and waited two hours for police to come to protect the business. Stekin may have remained there after officers arrived as he later reported that they could not stop the damage and looting. Alternatively, he could have observed events from an apartment above the store at 363 Lenox Avenue; he had lived in the building in 1930, the federal census recorded.
Attacks on 363 Lenox Avenue likely began around 11:00 PM or 11:30 PM. This block saw extensive attacks on white businesses during the disorder. Michael D'Agostino's business at 361 Lenox Avenue was looted, while the South Harlem Rotisserie at 365 Lenox Avenue and the laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue had windows broken. Across the street, businesses at 372 and 374 Lenox Avenue were also looted.
Stekin's business at 363 Lenox Avenue may have been a stationery store. The New York Sun and New York World-Telegram mistakenly identified his store at 371 Lenox Avenue as a stationery store, perhaps as a result of confusing which of his two businesses operated at which address. The MCCH business survey found two white-owned businesses at 363 Lenox Avenue in the second half of 1935, a stationery store and a delicatessan. In 1930, the federal census recorded that the apartments in 363 Lenox Avenue were anomalous in this area of Harlem at that time in being home to only white residents. In addition to Stekin, the six other households included three headed by men who owned stores in Harlem later looted during the disorder, William Gindin, Jacob Saloway, and Michael D'Agostino. All three men joined Stekin in suing the city for damages. While Gindin at least had relocated to another building on Lenox Avenue by the time of the disorder, Stekin may still have lived at 363 Lenox Avenue in 1935 (he resided somewhere other than the address on 128th Street that was recorded as his home in the 1940 census).
The looting of 363 Lenox Avenue was not mentioned in the newspaper stories about business owners suing the city published at the end of July, in which Stekin described the attack on his grocery store and the failure of police to protect his business. After the city lost the civil case that went to trial to test the merchants' case, Stekin's actions for damages were one of seven cases taken to the Supreme Court to determine the city's liability. Stories on the case identify Stekin because he received the largest award, for damages to both his stores, although newspaper stories disagreed on the amount. The New York Times identified the award as $550 for damages to both the grocery store and the business at 363 Lenox Avenue, while the New York Amsterdam News identified the award as $700. While the New York Times reported that the city would appeal the decisions, there is no evidence that happened. No one among those arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from this store.
Stekin had sought $2,068 for damage to the grocery store and an unspecified amount for 363 Lenox Avenue. The New York Sun reported he was "not in business anymore" in describing the damage to the grocery store; that statement did not appear to have applied to the store at 363 Lenox Avenue. When Stekin registered for the draft in 1942 he still owned and worked at that business, which his wife Lillian told an enumerator for the 1940 census was a grocery store (which is what appears in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941). He may have changed the nature of that store after his grocery store at 371 Lenox Avenue went out of business. By the time of the 1940 census he had moved to the edge of Harlem; the enumerator recorded him living at 400 West 128th Street, on the west side of St. Nicholas Park. By 1942 Stekin had moved further from the neighborhood, to 621 West 169th Street in Washington Heights. -
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2021-05-05T16:19:28+00:00
Harry Piskin's laundry looted
28
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2023-12-01T00:49:28+00:00
Harry Piskin's laundry at 100 West 126th Street, just off Lenox Avenue, was first the target of stones, according to testimony he gave to the city comptroller reported by the New York Sun. The intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, and the blocks of the avenue to the north were the site of multiple acts of violence and attacks on businesses during the disorder, but there is no clear evidence of when crowds would have first arrived at the laundry other than the report that looting of a store at the intersection started around 10:30 PM. It was likely attacks on the laundry began not long after, around 11:00 PM. The stones were eventually followed by a bullet fired into the laundry's show window, Piskin testified, according to the New York Sun. The story quoted an exchange in which the comptroller asked Piskin if he had heard other pistol shots; he answered "plenty." There are no other mentions of guns being fired in attacks on businesses; shooting was instead associated with police responding to looting. As in other stories about the disorder, shooting signified a greater level of violence than stones being thrown. At issue in this case was the police response: the comptroller's next question in the exchange reported by the New York Sun was, "Did [the police] send protection?" Piskin answered, "they did not."
Instead, after the shot at the window, Piskin testified that "they looted his laundry, broke all of his machinery and drove him out of business." George's Lunch, the neighboring business on the corner of West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, suffered similarly extensive damage. At some point he sought help. He first found a police officer a block away at the intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue: "Report it--I can't leave my post," the officer told him, according to the New York Post. He continued across town to the police station on West 123rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues: "Oh we know all about it," was the response there. Later, a police officer responded to Piskin's complaints about the lack of police protection by telling him, "My life is more important to me than your business is to you," testimony reported in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram. Piskin had joined other white merchants in suing the city for damages, so he had an incentive to emphasize police failures. Nonetheless, the extent of the attacks on businesses and violence in this area, and the small number of arrests, most of which came several hours after crowds first arrived on the avenue, add weight to his complaint. No one arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from the laundry.
The only mention of the damage to Piskin's laundry was in newspaper stories about the claims against the city made by white business owners. Piskin was part of the group of twenty who filed the first claims identified by the New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, New York American, and New York Amsterdam News in April and was mentioned again in stories published by the New York Evening Journal, New York Sun, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and New York Amsterdam News at the end of July, by which time 106 merchants had filed suits. He appeared as an example in those stories likely because he claimed the largest sum for damages, $14,125 (the next largest claim was from the adjacent business, George's Lunch), well above the median reported claim of $733. The city lost the cases that went to trial to resolve the merchants' claims, so it was likely that Piskin received some compensation. Surprisingly, his was not among the seven claims in the first trial in the Supreme Court in March 1936, which involved others from the group identified in April, all represented by the same attorney, Barney Rosenstein. However, the sums the jury awarded in that trial were only a small proportion of the claims, so any award Piskin received was likely insufficient for him to remain in business. The MCCH business survey taken from June to December 1935 did not record a laundry at 100 West 126th Street. The Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 did not offer a clear view of what business was operating at that address. -
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2021-12-05T22:48:45+00:00
Temple Grill & Restaurant windows broken
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2023-12-02T01:44:02+00:00
Just after midnight, windows in the Temple Grill & Restaurant at 317 Lenox Avenue were broken. Officer Alfred Tait of the 42nd Precinct testified in the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw a group of about thirty people assemble in front of the business. Then, about 12:15 AM, he allegedly heard Bernard Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man shout to the group, "We will get this two windows here," and saw him then throw two stones at the restaurant windows, breaking them. Smith then allegedly shouted to the others, "You fellows get the others." Tait presumably arrested Smith in front of the store, although his statement did not mention the circumstances, but according to the officer, members of the group in front of the restaurant acted on Smith's urging, as "thereafter there were several acts of force and violence committed in said vicinity to other persons and property of others."
Located in the block between 125th and 126th Streets, the restaurant was in an area where multiple stores were reported as looted or damaged, with particularly extensive damage to both George Chronis' restaurant a building further north on the southwest corner of West 126th Street and Harry Piskin's laundry next to it on West 126th Street. Across the street, ten minutes before Tait observed the attack on the restaurant, another officer had arrested two other men who, like Smith, had allegedly urged another group to attack a drug store. By the time Chronis arrived at his restaurant at 1 AM, it had been "completely demolished," according to a story in the New York World-Telegram.
Bernard Smith was the last person to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where he was charged with both malicious mischief, for allegedly breaking the window, and inciting a riot, for his alleged call for the group to break other windows. Held in custody by Magistrate Renaud, Smith returned to court on March 25, when bail was set at $500 for the first charge and $1,000 for the second, and then again on March 26, when Magistrate Ford sent him to grand jury on the charge of riot. Prosecutors reduced the charge of malicious mischief to disorderly conduct, of which Magistrate Ford found him guilty and sentenced him to five days in the Workhouse. A week later Smith appeared before the grand jury, which dismissed the riot charge.
Although the business Smith allegedly attacked was not named in the Magistrates Court affidavit or the Home News story on Smith's first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court, an advertisement for the "Temple Grill Bar and Restaurant" at 317 Lenox Avenue appeared in the New York Age on March 9, 1935, just ten days before the disorder. It was still in business when the MCCH business survey was taken in the second half of 1935, identified as a white-owned business (the advertisement in 1935 identified Phillip Portoghese as the proprietor). A storefront of the kind that would fit a bar and restaurant is visible in the Tax Department photograph but the signage is not legible, so whether the business survived until 1939–1941 is unknown. -
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2021-05-04T20:26:44+00:00
George Chronis' restaurant looted
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2023-11-30T00:44:18+00:00
George's Lunch, the lunchroom at 319 Lenox Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 126th Street, owned by George Chronis, was open for business when crowds appeared on the street. The intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, and the blocks of the avenue to the north were the site of multiple acts of violence and attacks on businesses during the disorder. Crowds likely first broke windows around 11:00 PM, after a group of men robbed Toby’s Men’s shop on the northwest corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue at 10:30 PM and before 11:20 PM, when a patrolman arrived at the shoe store a block to the north to find smashed windows and merchandise missing from the display. Chronis told the city comptroller that the lunchroom was staffed by one white and two Black workers that evening, according to a story in the New York Post. The Black men reacted to the disorder by leaving the restaurant, while the white man called the police station house and then locked himself in a washroom. No police responded to his call. Groups continued to sporadically break windows, take merchandise, and occasionally attack whites they encountered on the streets on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street for the next three hours.
Chronis heard about the disorder and tried to get to his business. However, police prevented him from doing so for several hours, the New York Post reported he told the comptroller. It was 1:00 AM by the time that Chronis got to the restaurant. He found his white staff member still locked in the washroom, and the lunchroom "completely demolished," according to the story in the New York World-Telegram. The business next door, Piskin's laundry, was also destroyed. The only mention of the damage to George's Lunch was in newspaper stories about the claims for damages from the city made by white merchants. Chronis was not part of the group of twenty who brought the first suits, but was mentioned in stories published in the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and New York Amsterdam News at the end of July about hearings before the city comptroller, by which time 106 merchants had filed suits. He appeared as an example in those stories because of the large damages he sought, $14,000, since, as the New York Sun put it, his business was "completely wiped out by looters." Those damages were also likely why Chronis was one of seven claimants in the first trial in the New York Supreme Court in March 1936, identified in the New York Herald Tribune.
Police did make arrests in the vicinity of George's Lunch around the time that they allowed Chronis access, indicating the presence of officers, although not in sufficient numbers to prevent ongoing attacks on businesses. But by then the damage to the restaurant had been done, and no one was arrested for those attacks. The jury awarded damages to all the claimants in the March 1936 trial, but no newspaper stories mentioned the amount awarded to Chronis. It would have been a small fraction of his claim of $14,000, as the largest reported amount was $550 to Irving Stekin. Even if the award to Chronis was close to what Stekin received, it was a dramatically smaller proportion than awarded to any other plaintiff. Surprisingly, it went unmentioned in the newspaper stories about the trial. It was no surprise then that Chronis appeared not to have reopened his business. It was missing from the MCCH business survey in late 1935 and replaced by another store in the Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941.
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2021-11-21T18:32:21+00:00
South Harlem Rotisserie window broken
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2023-12-01T02:05:39+00:00
South Harlem Rotisserie at 365 Lenox Avenue had its window broken during the disorder. A central section of the window was smashed, leaving intact the street number and the text "South Harlem" and portions of the letters making up "Rotisserie." A white man in the store looks through the window, directly at the camera, in footage in the Pathe newsreel from the day after the disorder. A sign showing prices is in the window, and another man inside the store is visible through the intact door, suggesting that the store may not have been looted. No other sources mention the damage to the store, and no one arrested during the disorder was charged with breaking the window.
Irving Stekin, who owned a grocery store three buildings north of the restaurant, complained that the crowds in the area were too large for police on the scene to control, according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. His store, at 371 Lenox Avenue, featured in the same Pathe newsreel as the South Harlem Rotisserie. That grocery store, and another owned by Stekin at 363 Lenox Avenue, and Michael D'Agostino's business at 361 Lenox Avenue were all looted, and suffered more extensive damage and losses than the restaurant, as did stores at 372 and 374 Lenox Avenue across the street. The laundry next to the South Harlem Rotisserie at 367 Lenox Avenue, like the restaurant, only had windows broken. Attacks on those businesses likely started around 11:30 PM.
The white-owned restaurant was recorded at this address in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935. The Tax Department photograph of the building shows a chicken restaurant at the address between 1939 and 1941, with signage in the window similar in shape to that in the newsreel but too far away to be legible. -
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2021-04-13T20:44:01+00:00
Henry Goodwin arrested
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2023-11-07T03:01:07+00:00
Officer Le Sage of the 76th Precinct arrested Henry Goodwin, a thirty-one-year-old Black man, who was charged with burglary. There was no evidence of the timing or details of the arrest or his alleged crime, as the only sources in which Goodwin appeared are the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book and the 28th Precinct police blotter. Goodwin was not in the lists of those arrested published in either the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide or the New York Evening News, perhaps because he was arrested after they were compiled. He did not appear in court until March 21, one of only seven arrested during the disorder who was not arraigned on March 20.
Benjamin Zelvin was recorded as the complainant against Goodwin in the docket book. He owned a jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue that suffered extensive looting in the hours after 11:30 PM, when he closed the store. All the windows were broken by 2:15AM, when Officer Astel arrived there with Oscar Leacock and John Henry, whom he claimed had admitted taking goods from the store when he had arrested them several blocks south of the store. Those men allegedly had about $75 of goods in their possession when arrested, according to Zelvin's Magistrate's Court affidavit. When Zelvin joined other merchants in suing the city for losses suffered in the disorder, the World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2,685 in damages. Goodwin was likely to have taken some of the additional missing merchandise. If so, he had traveled some distance from his home at 17 East 119th Street, below Mt. Morris Park, ten blocks south of Zelvin's store.
If Goodwin did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they apparently were of little value. Charged with burglary when he first appeared in court, Goodwin was held on bail, and then returned to court the next day, March 22. At that time the charge against him was reduced to petit larceny, and Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, to be tried for a misdemeanor. The police blotter records that on March 28 the judges convicted him and sentenced him to six months in the workhouse. -
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2020-12-03T17:17:51+00:00
Looting with staff or owners present (12)
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2023-12-13T04:08:21+00:00
When the disorder began in early evening, many stores in Harlem were still open for business, as a number remained open until late evening. As a result, some of the men and women working in those stores were present when they were attacked and looted (most around West 125th Street, where the disorder began, but others further away). Some of those in stores initially tried to move merchandise from display windows to prevent it from being taken. Both Jack Sherloff and Max Greenwald had to give up those efforts in the face of objects being thrown at the windows. More often stones thrown at the store windows kept those inside away from the storefront, driving them to hide in the rear rooms or to flee the building entirely before anyone actually entered the store. Mrs. Salefas fled flying glass from shattered windows to hide in a rear storeroom. Harry Piskin remained while stones were thrown through the windows of his laundry, but left when someone shot a bullet into the store. A white staff member in Chronis’ restaurant hid in the washroom, while two Black workers left the store. Four staff from the Greenfield auto equipment store fled the building into the rear yard after a group of men came through a broken window. Mario Pravia and his wife, Irving Stekin, and clerks in Estelle Cohen’s store and Young’s hat store watched from the store as stones smashed the glass and goods were taken from window displays. Louise Thompson also recounted looking in a grocery store on West 124th Street and 7th Avenue that "was dark, all of the windows were broken and all I could see was a man peeking out from the back." Such accounts highlight that the objects thrown at stores cleared the way for looting not just by providing a means of entering the store but by ensuring there was no one inside to protect the merchandise.
In only two instances were owners and staff apparently directly involved in merchandise being taken, circumstances that amounted to robbery rather than burglary. Morris Towbin alleged that Edward Larry and seven others came into store and threatened him and a clerk with knives as they attacked and looted the store, then forced them into the store basement. A second man, Louis Tonick, one of the ten white men arrested during the disorder, was also charged with robbery, but there is no information regarding the location or details of those events.
Irving Stekin waited two hours before a police car containing two officers arrived in response to his call for help, a detail reported in the New York Sun, New York Post, and New York World-Telegram. When they arrived, he told the city comptroller that "The police didn't do anything. They couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the World-Telegram. Others working in stores received no help at all from police. The white worker in Chronis’ restaurant phoned police before hiding; no one responded to his call. Estelle Cohen phoned both the police station and police headquarters after the staff member inside her store called her; she wrote to Mayor La Guardia that their responses was “that all the men were out and that all windows were being smashed." Harry Piskin left his laundry to go in search of police; neither the officer he found on post at a nearby corner nor an officer at the police stationhouse on West 123rd Street would come to the store. (Benjamin Zelvin waited for police to arrive before leaving his store, but those officers clearly did not remain to guard the business as he seemed to have expected as it was looted later in the disorder.)
While almost all the white businessowners in Harlem lived outside the neighborhood, some did return to their closed businesses when they learned of the disorder. Herman Young was one of the few white storeowners who lived in Harlem, above his store; he came downstairs when he heard glass smashing and interrupted a group of men looting his hardware store. His arrival likely prevented that group from taking much merchandise, but Young was hit by a rock and taken to Harlem Hospital (likely leaving his damaged store exposed to looting by others, as his total loss of $500 is far more than the four men could have taken). After a call from a clerk in the store, Estelle Cohen sent someone, likely her sons, to board up the damaged windows of her store. That barrier did not prevent subsequent looting. George Chronis also likely received a call from his staff, but police prevented him from getting to his lunchroom until 1 AM, to find it completely destroyed and a white staff member still hiding. Anthony Avitable also arrived too late to protect his food market, seeing crowds attacking the store as he drove across the 138th Street bridge from the Bronx just after midnight, so went directly to the police station rather than to his business. It still took forty-five minutes for police to arrive at the business. Herbert Canter, who owned a pharmacy at 419 Lenox Avenue, arrived there at 11 PM, earlier than Chronis and Avitable and may have been more successful in protecting his business. He testified in the Municipal Court trial of Anna Rosenberg's suit for damages about what he saw on Lenox Avenue after he arrived, but there is no mention of damage to his store.
Black storeowners had more success than their white counterparts in protecting their stores from attack and looting. Several posted signs in their stores reading “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” according to the Afro-American, that caused crowds to pass them by. A Chinese storeowner who tried to emulate that tactic apparently did not have the same success, as the New York Herald Tribune reported that after he posted a sign reading “Me colored too,” his store windows were broken. Some of the Black storeowners who wrote signs may have been open for business when the disorder reached them, or could have returned to closed businesses, which they could do more readily than white storeowners as most lived in Harlem (Fred Campbell did not).