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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

2:00 PM to 2:30 PM

Just after 2:00 PM, Lino Rivera, a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, walked through the front doors of the S. H. Kress 5-10-25c store on West 125th Street. Earlier in the day, around noon, he had taken the subway to Brooklyn, having heard about a job opening for an errand boy. The position had been filled by the time he arrived. It was not the first time he had unsuccessfully visited Brooklyn looking for work. Rivera had stopped attending Textile High School six months earlier to work on a delivery truck, but had to leave that job after a month. His mother, Anna, had a job at a powder-puff factory, but his father had died soon after the family arrived in New York City in 1923. Anna and Rivera shared an apartment with another woman and her child on the 7th floor of 272 Manhattan Avenue. Returning from Brooklyn, he had exited the subway at 125th Street rather than continuing two more stops to his home fourteen blocks further south. He had then gone to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street west of the subway station, the main entertainment and commercial district north of Central Park.
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Rivera would have been far from alone in coming to 125th Street (as this photograph taken a month later showed). As well as the subway station on Lenox Ave, a bus route on 7th Avenue and an elevated train line on 8th Avenue also stopped at 125th Street, and a street car line ran its length. In the 1930s, the residential districts south as well as north of 125th Street had filled with Black residents, who had become a majority of the district’s customers. As a result, Rivera would have had his choice of theaters, no longer having to avoid several because they admitted only white patrons. To the contrary, theaters had begun to change as their patronage did, with the Apollo opening the previous year with theatrical shows catering to Black audiences as well as movies and a Black staff. That theater may have been Rivera’s choice; it was opposite the Kress store. With nothing to do after the show ended, he wandered into the store to look around; it also offered a shortcut to 124th Street on his way home.

In going into the Kress store, Rivera was visiting another attraction that drew people to 125th Street, the large stores of various kinds that, like the theaters, spanned the entire width of a block. A 5-and-10-cent store, Kress, like the Woolworth’s store to its east, offered cheaper merchandise than the street's department stores, Blumstein, Koch, and McCrory. Small counters displaying different types of merchandise were scattered throughout the store, behind which stood white staff. The lack of Black sales staff in stores on 125th Street, all of which were white-owned, had been the target of boycott campaigns and pickets for the previous three years, although the Kress store had not been one of those singled out. Around fifty other people were in the store when Rivera walked in, almost all of them Black women, a clientele to which the boycott campaign had drawn attention in making the case for hiring Black staff. Rivera made his way through the store to the rear half, which was twice the width of the shopfloor at the front. A pocketknife on a counter caught his attention. He reached out and put it in his jacket pocket without anyone behind the counter seeing what he had done. His action, however, did not go unnoticed. In one of the offices fifteen feet above that section of Kress’ store, Charles Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white floorwalker who supervised the sales staff, who was watching the counters with the store manager, Jackson Smith, saw Rivera take the knife. He called out to the store detective, pointed out the boy, and headed downstairs. Catching boys shoplifting was a regular part of the men’s work. Petty theft was one of the responses to unemployment, poverty, and lots of time to fill in that led to boys from Harlem appearing in the Children’s Court, although far less common than violating regulations against shining shoes on the street, selling newspapers after 7:00 PM, hitching on street trolleys, and riding the subway without paying – the last of which Rivera had been arrested for just a week earlier. Without a nickel to pay for a subway trip back to Harlem after another trip to Brooklyn responding to a job ad, he had used tinfoil from a cigarette packet to make a slug to put in the subway turnstile. He later told a magistrate in the Brooklyn Adolescent Court he had used slugs twenty-five times before without being caught. On that day, a railroad police officer saw him. When he took the pocketknife, Rivera was on parole, due back in court the next week.

Arriving on the shopfloor, Hurley grabbed Rivera and demanded the pocketknife. When Rivera denied having taken the knife, Hurley took it from his jacket pocket. Telling the boy to leave the store, he pushed him toward the 125th Street entrance, joined by the store detective. Rivera tried to shake off the men walking on either side of him, telling them he could walk out on his own. As they neared the front entrance Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Scared of being beaten, Rivera began to “really fight,” throwing his arms around. In response, Hurley put his arm around the boy’s shoulders to restrain him, helped by a window dresser, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white man, who also put his arms around Rivera. Once out of store, in the vestibule, the store detective left to get an officer from the Crime Prevention Bureau. That police agency provided an alternative to arrests of children, with its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Staff at the Kress store referred most of the boys they caught shoplifting to the Crime Prevention Bureau and had police arrest only one or two a week. A referral meant that Rivera would not face a trip to court after being caught in the store like he had when caught putting a slug in the subway turnstile.

However, at that moment, Rivera, was more worried about a beating from the Kress store staff than what he faced from police and the courts. Continuing to try to get away after the store detective left, Rivera bit Hurley and Urban on the hands with which they had hold of him. Standing on the street outside the Kress store, Patrolman Donohue saw this struggle and came to investigate, as did at least two other police, his partner Patrolman Keel and a Black officer named Miller. That there were that number of officers near the Kress store reflected both how busy 125th Street was, and the additional police stationed there after the picketing of businesses the previous year. Donohue sent Miller to call an ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban and took Rivera and the two men back inside the store, away from a curious crowd that was gathering.
 

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