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

Chain grocery store looted

Some time during the disorder, a "chain store at 135th St. and Lenox Ave" was looted, according to a story in the Home News. The store was likely the A & P grocery store at 510 Lenox Avenue, the only chain grocery store near that intersection in the MCCH Business survey. That store was in the six-story building on the northeast corner of the intersection, about four stores north of the corner. The white-owned A & P chain had nine grocery stores in Harlem, and James Butler, the other white-owned grocery chain with stores in Harlem, had seven stores in the MCCH Business survey. The only reference to the looting is a Home News report of the appearance in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court of three Black men, twenty-eight-year-old Raymond Taylor, forty-two-year-old Preston White, and fifty-year-old Joseph Payne. White and Payne allegedly smashed the store window and took food. Taylor was arrested "stealing a quantity of groceries." All three men were arrested "in the store." Officer Archbold of the 30th Precinct is recorded as having arrested White and Payne, and Officer D. Conn of the 24th Precinct as having arrested Taylor, in the Magistrates Court docket book. There is no mention of the value of the merchandise the men allegedly stole. Only one other reported event occurred on Lenox Avenue north of West 135th Street, the arrests of Charles Alston, Edward Loper, Albert Yergen, and Ernest Johnston for allegedly shooting at police at 138th Street at the very end of the disorder. As on the blocks of Lenox Avenue south of 135th Street, more than three-quarters of the businesses on the block containing the grocery store were white-owned.

Taylor, White, and Payne appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with burglary. No complainant was listed. When the three men returned to the Magistrates Court on March 26, the charge against them was reduced from burglary to disorderly conduct. Magistrate Ford convicted all three men and sentenced White and Payne each to five months and twenty-nine days in the Workhouse and suspended Taylor's sentence. There is no information on why Taylor received a different sentence.

If the looted store was the A & P store at 510 Lenox Avenue, it continued in business after the disorder, appearing in both the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935 and the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.



 

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